This high-octane investment bank drama is a sleeper hit
By Benji Wilson
We live, you can’t fail to have noticed, in an age of too much TV. (Or perhaps you were watching too much TV to notice.) One consequence of the global screen glut is that it’s easier than ever for a great show to fly under the radar.
Industry, HBO’s high-octane, tack-sharp drama set in a London investment bank, is a prime example. Its third season begins next week, yet because seasons one and two arrived at the same time as another zeitgeisty business show about the mega-rich behaving badly (Succession), or perhaps because its scenes of brutal workplace trauma were mimicked in The Bear (but in a kitchen, not on a trading floor), Industry remains something of a sleeper hit. Which is an odd thing to say for a cocaine-fuelled, very loud show about to begin its third run.
Still, it is a fact that its star Harry Lawtey, who plays young banker Robert, is happy to acknowledge: “I don’t personally ever feel like we were mainstream,” he says.
Kit Harington, in his first series role since Game of Thrones, with Marisa Abela.Credit: Simon Ridgway
“I always felt like we were an ‘if you know … you know’ kind of thing. And that in some ways has been a nice existence for the show. It’s made it feel like a bit of a hidden gem, at least I hope it has. What’s lovely is the people that you meet or speak to who are fans of the show … they’re normally quite fervent about it. They really like it.”
Industry began life in 2020 as a hyper-caffeinated workplace steeplechase: five young graduates joined the London office of Pierpoint & Co, a fictional US bank, on probation. They had six months to prove themselves, after which half of them would be nixed. It was sink or swim, high-stakes jostling for position, all set against a backdrop of the kind of outrageous financial manoeuvres that in the real world had seen big banks needing to be bailed out by the public just a decade ago.
Once the battle royale was done, season two saw Robert (Lawtey), Yasmin (Marisa Abela) and Harper (Myha’la) go to work. Industry’s creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, both of whom were once graduates in banks themselves, broadened the focus, looking at the bank’s relationship with a hedge fund manager who’d made a mint in the pandemic, Yasmin’s privileged family background and Harper’s comeuppance for lying about her CV.
Come season three, however, Industry is looking to go even bigger. For a start, it’s managed to bag Game of Thrones’ Kit Harington in his first series role since he took off Jon Snow’s pelt.
“After a few years of not having a proper, season-long arc as a character on a TV show, I was like, ‘I miss that. I want to do that again’,” Harington says. “My agent came back to me and said, ‘Do you watch Industry?’ I did. I love the show. It had this energy to it and tonally it felt very different to anything I had seen before. I think it comes from the fact they hired a lot of young actors straight from drama school and they themselves [Down and Kay] were creators who were pretty green when they started out.”
In season three Harington plays the superbly named Henry Muck, an English aristo who comes into the story as the CEO of a green energy startup. Pierpoint is hired to launch Muck’s company’s IPO as part of its own attempt to clean up its ethical act and get into the growth area of ESG (economical, social, governance) investing.
If that all sounds quite topical – evangelical tech founder who claims he’s in it for more than just the money; cynical bank greenwashing its reputation – it’s deliberate.
Myha’la in Industry: “This show gave me my career.”
“Season one was about five grads and we only focused on their lives: it didn’t really give a shit about what they actually did in their job,” says Down. “But as much as we love those characters, we also love writing about the contemporary world. Hopefully it means the show is a lot more accessible than it was in the first two seasons – this is about more things that people will understand.”
The third season of Industry does indeed spend more time in the real world than on the trading floor. Harper, for example, played by Myha’la, finds herself ejected from Pierpoint and on the hunt for work. Yasmin (Abela) becomes embroiled in a scandal when her father goes on the run and the British tabloids decide that she’s the privileged heiress who knows where the money is. More than ever the links between big finance and government are examined, with the ramifications of Britain’s disastrous 49-day prime minister Liz Truss’ “mini-budget” played out on the Pierpoint sales floor; and the nexus of connections between politics, the media and finance is teased apart in quiet conversations at private members’ clubs and on country estates.
“Me and Mickey,” says Kay, “were very cognisant of the fact that the show did a pretty poor job in the first few seasons of looking at the real-world consequences of people’s ambition, people’s companies, the idea of something failing and then being bailed out. That’s obviously something people know about all too well now. So we wanted to tell a more universal story.”
It’s notable that unlike the fictional Pierpoint bank, Industry the show has managed to hang on to its best and brightest – Abela is now a movie star after playing Amy Winehouse in Sam Taylor Wood’s Amy; Myha’la has appeared in Netflix’s Leave the World Behind and led an episode of the most recent series of Black Mirror. The show’s stars are loyal because they too see Industry as a diamond.
“This show gave me my career,” Myha’la says. “I am beyond grateful — I have not yet in my six years out here in the world as a professional working actor read something as poignant, as worldly, as clever and as deeply, deeply rooted in humanity as Mickey and Konrad’s writing.”
With the end of Succession, Industry is now HBO’s only contemporary drama: in the US it has been granted a prime Sunday-night slot. For those missing their fix of one percenters behaving badly, or even those just missing Harington after Game of Thrones, it is an obvious next pick.
“Our north star,” says Kay, “both in directing and writing, is intensity. People talked about season one and two being intense. We took that as a challenge. When people say Industry at its best makes them feel a bit nauseous, that’s like ‘OK, that’s great’. That’s the show functioning on some sort of visceral level, which means that people might even put their phones down when they watch it. To us, that would be the highest praise.”
Industry (season 3) is on Binge from August 12.
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