If you miss the colorfully profane world of Succession, a show where most characters would gladly sell their souls for power and money, then you should be watching HBO Max’s Industry. While they share some similarities — both come from British creators and follow a cadre of anti-heroic characters into a world of hyperwealth — Industry is even more focused on the inhuman ambition that drives its characters.
While Succession follows a family that’s already wealthy and striving to hold onto its relevance, Industry centers on a group of twenty-somethings who are (mostly) not rich and are all desperate to prove themselves at London’s renowned investment bank Pierpoint & Co. Breaking with the rampant nepotism of the Roy family, their workplace could charitably be described as meritocratic — who you are doesn’t matter as much as the money you bring in — but it’s also an obscenely toxic world devoid of morality.
Our gateway to the world of Pierpoint is Harper Stern (Myha’la Herrold, Bodies Bodies Bodies), a genius trader with a dark secret (she never graduated college). As a young black American woman, she stands out from the sea of mostly white British men on the sales floor. Perhaps that’s why her New Yorker boss, Eric Tao (Ken Leung, Lost), sees her as a potential protege. Harper works alongside Yasmin (Marisa Abel), the daughter of a wealthy publishing family; Gus, a gay black conservative trader; and Harry (Robert Spearing), the obligatory high achiever from a working-class background.
In season three, premiering on August 11, Game of Thrones’ Kit Harrington joins the cast as Henry Muck, the wealthy CEO of Lumi, a beloved green tech energy startup on the verge of an IPO. (Not to be confused with actual companies like the design studio Lumi, the piano learning gadget Lumi, or the dead packaging firm Lumi.) But, like a cross between Theranos, Solyndra and the slew of failed Obama-era green tech startups, Lumi may not entirely live up to its eco-friendly hype. Some banks would have qualms about pushing a problematic company into the stock market, but not Pierpoint — its job is to make money on the IPO, not judge the long term viability of Lumi.
That sort of amoral viewpoint isn’t anything new for Pierpoint or its minions on Industry. From the beginning, series creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay avoided turning the series into a lecture against the investment banking world. Instead, its characters all reflect the selfish philosophy initially laid down by Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko: “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”
While some characters voice their concerns about Lumi, Industry explores the more cynical (and arguably realistic) outcome: Just about everyone finds a way to profit from the company’s potential failure — except, of course, for Lumi’s customers and early investors.
“We wanted to write about an energy company that had real world stakes that felt like it was scratching the heels a bit of the sort of bigger monopolistic competitors,” Down said in an interview on the Engadget Podcast. “And then also we wanted to write about the collapse of a company like that — a company which [has] really been founded to do something really good and what happens when that company goes kaput and leaves a lot of destruction in its wake.”
Industry started out as a show focused on interpersonal relationships between a small group of colleagues, their hedonistic night lives and Pierpoint’s erosion of their humanity, but now it’s scope has expanded to include the wider global economy, Britain’s role in propping up failed companies and rival trading outfits.
“When we started off, we were very inexperienced writers,” Kay said. “We deliberately wrote about a very sealed off hermetic experience, a very universal one, which is people starting in the workplace at a certain time. 1723050780 The stakes are higher. It’s more interested in how the training floor intersects with the wider world, politics, newspapers, media, class.”
Beyond the inner-workings of finance and the soapy romantic lives of Industry’s characters, the real draw of the show is “watching competent people be good at their jobs,” as Down says. It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand all of the financial jargon the characters are spouting off in the first season. Like a cross between Margin Call and Michael Clayton, what makes Industry truly compelling is seeing smart people prove their brilliance repeatedly in a pressure cooker environment.
For a show that seemed like a Succession clone early on, Industry has evolved into something dramatically different. Wealth and success isn’t a given for anyone in the show — it’s something they have to earn with blood, sweat and moral compromise.
