In 2013, a Bank of America intern in London was found dead in a shower after working 72 hours straight. The 21-year-old, Moritz Erhardt, was one week from the end of his probationary period. Noting that Erhardt had suffered from epilepsy, a coroner’s inquest stopped short of blaming his employer. Anyone familiar with the way investment banking attracts ambitious young people and hazes them through hierarchical and status-conscious workplaces may have come to his own conclusions. But values differ. Rather than the company exploiting his son, Erhardt’s father told a reporter, Moritz had been “exploiting himself.”
That incident, portrayed in a fictionalized form in its first season, was surely one of the catalysts for Industry, an extremely watchable, sometimes queasy-making HBO series about junior bankers in London. The drama, whose second season just started, is Succession crossed with Skins or Euphoria: boardroom intrigue plus good-looking young people behaving badly. Lena Dunham directed the first episode of the first season, which seems puzzling until you start to see how the show’s gratuitously graphic sex scenes and Freudian debasement might appeal to the creator of Girls.
Set at the fictional bank Pierpoint, Industry is about status, privilege, and upward mobility, as experienced by characters who are a mix of outsiders and to the manner born. It is also a compelling ethnographic study of a workplace culture — one in which strict but opaque rules govern what you can or can’t wear, saying a wrong word to a client might lose millions of dollars, and being able to hold your liquor is almost as important as your knowledge of markets. There is no God here, unless it is Adam Smith’s invisible hand. “I played third fiddle to two figures in my mother’s life: Jesus Christ and Margaret Thatcher,” a smirking Old Etonian, Gus Sackey (David Jonsson), tells a job interviewer. “One’s the reason we’re all here. And the other’s a carpenter.”
The audience proxy is Harper Stern (Myha’la Herrold), an outsider and, as a black person from upstate New York who was educated at a state college, a relative oddity. Harper is smart, ambitious, and brittle — and perhaps hiding some things from her past. Her boss, Eric Tao (a compelling and sometimes terrifying Ken Leung), talent-spotted her in the first season, drawn to vouch for her in part because he recognized a fellow scrapper and striver. Harper has some sense of kinship with Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey), a trainee from a working-class British background. He graduated from the University of Oxford but freely admits that he chose his course because it was the easiest to get into.
Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) is a study in contrast to Harper and Robert — a posh, Lebanese British woman who seems to speak half a dozen languages, including the language of the rich. She always wears the right clothes and usually says the right things. Yasmin faces a tough time in her own way, however. Her colleagues hold her poshness against her and treat her like a coffee-fetching geisha, and her rich family is flaky and cruel.
Much of the suspense of the previous season came from the question of whether the trainee bankers would survive the ruthless post-probation culling known as RIF (Reduction In Force). Now the question is whether they can make enough money and bring in enough new business to protect their office from being subsumed by its aggressive sister division in New York. An increasingly squirrelly Harper, who has been living out of a hotel and refusing to return to the office, has a possible ace up her sleeve: a mysterious guest at her hotel may be Jesse Bloom (Jay Duplass), a legendary investor known as “Mr. Covid” for shrewdly exploiting the pandemic to make billions. Her efforts to land Bloom, the ultimate whale of potential business, will put her in direct conflict with her tyrannical mentor, Eric.
A trading floor has its limits as scene-setting locales go, so Industry seems to be working in more locations this season — the third episode, at a Welsh country estate, involves a bird hunt with investors that goes spectacularly awry. The show’s creators, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, used to work in finance and have imbued Industry with an Aaron Sorkin-y zest for jargon. I couldn’t say how realistic the business scenes are, though I will say that it is a testament to the show’s pacing and sense of conflict that it remains gripping despite dialogue such as, “There is potential for this company to be a market leader in a genuine growth area.”
Industry’s characters are its bread and butter — but perhaps also an area of screenwriting risk. They’re often so unlikable, and so given to self-sabotage and dubious decisions, that it can be hard to feel much sympathy. Then again, the famously cynical Succession has managed to weave the tension inherent to our desire to understand unlikable people into Shakespearean comedy-drama. I suspect Industry is going to take a similar tack, humanizing the characters with glimpses of their backgrounds and the roots of their dysfunctions.
The creators indicated as much in a recent interview with Vanity Fair. “Why is Yasmin the way she is with men at work?” asked Kay, the co-creator. “OK, well, let’s meet her father because her relationship with her father is going to tell us a lot about her relationship with Kenny. Why is Harper so incapable of showing love for people? Let’s meet a member of her family and see what that explains.” I expect that Industry will start picking up more fans as this season continues. It seems like a market leader in a genuine growth area.
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
