Three seasons into HBO’s financial drama Industry, I often find myself wondering, How are any of these people still alive?
The show has single-handedly turned the idea of working at an investment bank (boring) into something out of Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, every character scheming and flirting and twirling ever closer to hell’s wide maw. You wouldn’t think there was any ante left for Industry to up, but in the frenetically paced third season, premiering Sunday night on HBO, it does just that, supercharging its characters’ schemes and plights directly into the seedy world of green-energy philanthropy. We’ve all heard the adage that evil is, when it rears its head, banal. In Industry, it’s spectacular.
The starry-eyed Pierpoint interns of Season 1 are now hardened soldiers in Eric Dao’s (Ken Leung) trading-floor troupe.
Yasmin Hanani (Marisa Abela) is back from a boating vacation in the Mediterranean, her celebrity father having gone missing, along with the family fortune, saddling her with rumors of embezzlement and paparazzi stalkers. Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey) has been assigned as a handler of sorts for Henry Muck (Kit Harington, just a shade away from his pretty idiot tennis player from 7 Days in Hell), the posh CEO of green-energy tech company Lumi, whose upcoming IPO Pierpoint is intending to back.
The only one missing is Harper Stern (Myha’la), who was ignominiously fired by Eric at the close of the previous season after he learned she’d never finished her college degree. Harper has managed to find herself a lower-tier job at a female-run American investment firm and immediately cozies up to one of the co-founders, the severe Petra Koenig (Sarah Goldberg), intending to leverage her new position and connections to her—and only her—advantage, as she always does.
If you’re a character in Industry, you’re either Job or Satan himself, or some indelible combination of both, doomed by the narrative and by your own narcissistic tendencies to ruin your life and the lives of everyone around you, no matter what choices you make, living off of hard drugs and pure spite. These people may hate their enemies, but they really hate their friends, and take every opportunity to make that searingly obvious.
Season 3 follows the ways in which they continue to attempt normal relationships with each other while ignoring the fact that they are all completely incapable of having a normal relationship with anybody. They’re people who spit the most insane sentences you’ve ever heard in your life at their friends’ and coworkers’ faces, and then both parties go about their days as if nothing happened. If you expect any of these people to act rationally when presented with any situation, you are betting on the losing ponies.
The best part of any season of Industry, but especially this one, is watching its characters repeatedly dunk themselves into deeper and deeper water. They are both Charlie Brown and Lucy van Pelt, yanking their own footballs out of the way of their own feet and landing on their backsides.
Yasmin is constantly letting her sexual compulsions get the best of her as she tries to philander her way out of actually thinking about what might have become of her abusive father (Adam Levy). Harper sort of tries to act however her version of a “good person” might, but her hungry ambition often overpowers her sense of moral decency. Foulmouthed market maker Rishi Ramdani (Sagar Radia) gets Scrooged during the season’s decidedly feel-bad Christmas episode that puts his gambling addiction under a harsh microscope.
Characters do not develop according to the wooden upward trajectory we’ve come to expect from stories told with less imagination. Everyone’s arc exists on a sine curve, charging upwards toward success and dipping downwards toward utter failure multiple times per episode.
If that all sounds a little too dour, worry not, because the show retains the vicious sense of humor that makes its shocks and thrills easier to stomach. Creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay have saddled their new characters with names that border on the Dickensian—a green-energy dilettante called “Henry Muck” speaks for itself, and Pierpoint’s newest hire is a blonde TikToker named Sweetpea Golightly. The early stages of Eric’s arc are perhaps the funniest, as, feeling his age for the first time in the wake of his divorce, he asks every sexual conquest whether or not they think he has the stamina of a younger man.
Every time a character seems to be on an upward trend philosophically, something happens to bring them right back down to the dirt and the grime of capitalist greed. You wonder how any of these people have the time to live in hedonist excess while their companies and lives are crumbling around them, but then you remember the financial world’s Sisyphean commitment to ever-increasing profits. While we’re all living out our brat summer, these folks are living a brat lifetime. And, boy, it’s fun to watch.
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