For a certain kind of television program, the gears and levers of the professional workplace are the instruments of drama. With what could Succession fill an hour were its protagonists not at war over corporate control? Where would Better Call Saul be without the practice of law or Killing Eve without its spycraft? Though a miasma of work hangs over Industry, HBO’s new series about investment banking and its discontents, the show’s true focus is not the trading room, but the social lives of the moneyed young. As such, the viewer who hopes to discover what brokers actually do all day is in for a serious disappointment.
Industry opens in the meeting spaces of Pierpoint & Co., a London firm in the process of interviewing potential recruits. Among the bank’s targets is Harper (Myha’la Herrold), an up-from-poverty striver with a forged college transcript and experience making “the moral case for capitalism.” Similarly positioned is Robert (Harry Lawtey), a University of Oxford graduate whose posh credentials can’t hide a coal miner’s accent. Along with Yasmin (Marisa Abela) and Gus (David Jonsson), fellow beginners from far superior backgrounds, Harper and Robert are on the cusp of a perilous adventure. As trial employees, they have six months to render themselves indispensable. Half a year in, a “reduction-in-force” event will eliminate 50% of the rookie class.
Among the many functions of this expository nugget is its usefulness in explaining the pace at which Harper and company labor. Coming to the end of a shift, one new hire naps in a bathroom stall before beginning another. Illicit stimulants are commonplace — “Take two and you’ll feel like you’re inventing Facebook” — and so are demanding bosses and maddeningly entitled customers. Despite their success in creating an atmosphere of frenetic worry, showrunners Mickey Down and Konrad Kay largely fail to connect the activity of Industry’s traders to any broader cultural narrative. The result is a series that uses jargon to characterize but asks few ethical questions, complicated or otherwise. When Harper’s supervisor barks his request for “the level of one-year euro swap in 500K DV01,” viewers recognize that Pierpoint’s workers have mastered arcana. What we don’t see is any particular reason to care.
Given the inscrutability of Industry’s technical subplots, it is perhaps unsurprising that the show frequently retreats to its characters’ bedrooms. Though Robert occasionally sleeps with Gus, his current crush is on the beautiful Yasmin, whose own long-standing relationship is a source of intermittent tension. Harper attempts to seduce Robert at the end of a long night of drinking, while Gus has a thorny relationship with a closeted university chum. Because Industry is running on HBO in the age of the “intimacy coordinator,” the show’s men are asked to disrobe as often as its women. (Shockingly, the program contains no transgender characters.) As with much premium cable fare, however, the scenes that follow are both exploitative and strangely cold. Rather than driving the action or titillating the viewer, such moments serve chiefly as a form of virtue signaling. Wokeness requires that actors of both sexes strip down, and Industry is happy to check the relevant box.
Indeed, a certain insincerity of approach is at the heart of many of the show’s problems. Similar to HBO’s despicable teenage drama Euphoria, Industry flops in part because it is about one age group but for another, a trait that leads not only to exaggeration but a tiresome anthropological detachment. Take, for example, a scene in which Yasmin’s boyfriend asserts that his startup relies on such “traditional” revenue streams as targeted advertising. In the unlikely event that Generation Z is tuning in on Monday nights, they’re certainly not getting a joke aimed squarely at mother and father.
That this dynamic persists in Industry’s action as well as its dialogue may help explain the show’s near-farcical portrayal of youthful drug abuse and sexuality. It is just possible, one supposes, that the bulk of London’s educated young are heteroflexible cocaine addicts who spend their evenings writhing to thumping beats. The more likely scenario is that Down and Kay are simply creating the cynical narrative that viewers are assumed to want. Just as Euphoria does, Industry exists to give 50-year-old HBO subscribers a frisson of fear and wonder at how the young are living these days. It isn’t entirely a lie, but neither is it anything close to the truth.
As with most pay-television dramas, Industry is too carefully made to be a disaster. Some audiences will enjoy the flirtation between Robert and Yasmin, while others will appreciate the performance of Ken Leung, who does good work as Harper’s tough but supportive boss. The program’s score, by Berlin-based producer Nathan Micay, is consistently evocative and daring. What Industry needs, however, is to trade its sexual intrigue for something that was on offer in J.C. Chandor’s remarkable 2011 film Margin Call: a sense that the choices of financiers can add up to something momentous. If HBO’s latest has a move of that sort in mind, it had better get to it in a hurry.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
