I spent the last month catching up with Industry, just in time to watch the final episodes of the third season as they came out. I've been ambivalent about the show ever since starting it. It's clearly incredibly brilliantly written and acted - whittled down to the bones, propulsive, frequently frenetic in its pace. It tickles my brain: I've never been anywhere near the financial industry, or any workplace that looks remotely like this, and so can't judge if the portrayal of the culture is accurate, but from how the proposed values and actions influence the world we live in, I wouldn't be surprised if it was. And yet, I find it hard to connect deeply to the characters when the centre of the show, or its main thesis that it is exploring, is how the commodification of everything - personal relationships, love, friendship, care - leads to a gaping abyss that swallows people whole, and turns them into moral black holes. The propulsive force behind the characters' actions is always self-interest, selfishness, future gains, and everything is always a zero-sum game, a win-lose scenario with a literal body count. It reminds me of a slew of other shows that left me with a similar feeling of deep emptiness (the expectation of this feeling kept me from ever watching Succession, which may be the most obvious comparison here): the now mostly forgotten legal thriller Damages, in which Glenn Close and Rose Byrne engage in a destructive struggle for power, the political thriller House of Cards (equally rarely mentioned now, though for very deeply depressing reasons). Some aspects feel reminiscent of Mad Men (maybe an ultimate show about the commercialisation of everything, eloquently executed up to the final scene), especially in how mentor-mentee relationships play out ("That's what the money is for" would work perfectly in Industry as well, with remuneration being a replacement for any kind of emotional care that human relationships depend on).
Abuse and predation are baked into the business model. In season one, Daria (Freya Mavor, Skins) serves up associates to a predatory client like a buffet, knowing fully well what will happen to them once she leaves them alone with Nicole. Nicole is an example of this world: a woman who thinks that the money that she is putting into Pierpoint entitles her to use its employees at will. From the start, the stakes are made clear when the first episode presents new graduate Hari as a potential main character, only for him to die in a toilet stall halfway through, after trying to keep up with the pressure through constant consumption of energy drinks and drugs. The idea of ethical investing is ridiculed as either a naive play ignorant of political and economic realities or as a cynical attempt to commodify changing attitudes towards climate change (RIP Lumi). Corporate social responsibility is consistently a thin, fragile mask over a reality of abuse and predation.
What Industry does so perfectly is translate the business model of Pierpoint, the investment bank where most of the action is set, into an ideology that affects all the relationships between the characters. It functions like a virus, like an infection. A predatory model of money-making at all costs, only very loosely constrained by laws which are frequently presented as obstacles to be overcome rather than red lines, turns every relationship into a quest for power. Information is essential, especially in a place where power if distributed so unevenly (from the start, the new associates are told that they are competing against each other for a few permanent spots), and so mining for information becomes the primary occupation of especially Harper (a truly outstanding Myha'la Herrold), who is already disadvantaged as an American in a British bank who has forged her educational credentials, competing against associates who have graduated from prestigious universities and come from highly networked, rich families. Much of the show contrasts Harper's struggle, which has turned her into a shark, with Yasmin's (Marisa Abela, who shines in the third season especially) privileged background: they are sometimes friends, sometimes feuding, a this question of whether true friendship is even possible in the environment is maybe the driving emotional force behind most of the show. Yasmin accuses Harper of being incapable of genuine feelings, Harper accuses Yasmin of being unaware of her privilege, and riding on someone else's coat tails, being spoon-fed the kind of access that Harper has always had to fight for.
The third main character for most of the show (others come in and out) is Robert (Harry Lawtey), an Oxford graduate from a working class background. Robert is used on the show to explore how rigid the British class structure is, how not even going to a lauded university truly changes his odds against other competitors who grew up in rich families, or have the money to dress the right way, or haven't had to teach themselves to talk a certain way to be taken seriously. Where Harper and Yasmin's relationship asks questions of the possibility of friendship, Robert begins a complex (and disturbing) psychosexual relationship with Yasmin, who wildly oscillates between her deep insecurity at work and obsession with power in her personal relationship with him - and instead of going the more trite route of interpreting Yasmin's power of him as some kind of feminist attainment, the show instead portrays their whole dance as damaging to them both, with Yasmin immediately turning anything that feels like love and care into something "ugly" (she verbalises this to him in the final episode of the third season), and Robert unable to cut himself free because he's fallen in love.
I'm fascinated by where everyone ends up at the end of the third season: Harper, who was fired from Pierpoint because her mentor Eric, who recognises himself in her but doesn't like losing control of his assets, gets rid of her (her forged credentials hang over her like an anvil throughout the first season), leaves a seemingly functional work environment built on mutual trust and shared decision making that is ill-suited to her worst instincts. She instead wants to use corporate espionage and forensic accounting to build a fund that specialises in shorting over-valued companies ("it's only criminal if we get caught" is a perfect summation of her approach to this business), utilising the money of a shady financier who is as contemptuous of laws and boundaries as she is. Harper is presented as an opportunistic character, who takes the credo of the financial industry she works in the most serious: anything is allowed as long as it makes money. This is undercut by the fact that she mixes in a solid dose of vengeance for past transgressions, as most of her decisions in the third season are driven by trying to get back at people she feels have wronged her (a move for which Eric appears to respect her enough to give her a quote for her appearance in the Forbes' 30 under 30 list). This approach gets a literal body count when she throws Rishi, a fellow Pierpoint trader, under the bus. Rishi is a different kind of personification of what happens when an industry appears to reward risk-taking and gambling with few constraints attached: he's fallen into deep gambling debts due to his addiction to risk, and his inability to pay them leads to the most shocking scene of the show so far, when the man he owes money to shoots his wife.
Yasmin, the focus point of the third season, ends up maintaining the privileges of her upbringing which she was about to lose due to legal action against her father by marrying a member of the aristocracy (Kit Harington doing great work with Henry Muck, in a world he seems to know well). Torn between what Robert has to offer, a kind of quaint normal life (Industry shows him buying a scratchy ticket, an action that Yasmin observes with a mix of deep fascination and abhorrence, a mix that describes her relationship to him well), and the safe and secure mantle of protection that moneyed power (not just that of the aristocracy, but also the protection of a yellow paper owner, uncle to Henry) could extend to her should she marry into it. Yasmin's father has been revealed to a be a serial abuser of children and women, and hinted to have abused Yasmin as well, even though the show never goes so far as to definitively confirm it (there are many transgressions, and deeply gross moments between them), instead offering it as a possible explanation for Yasmin's trauma response. Robert gets left behind but is likely better off for it, jumping ship at Pierpoint to become a money guy for a psychedelics start-up (the show's most obvious reference to Mad Men is his sales pitch - earlier in the season, an Ayahuasca trip is presented as mind-changing and beautiful, but the characters experiencing it immediately turn to ways to turn a profit from it) just before Pierpoint implodes. There's a continuing sense here that the only escape hatch from the abyss is to leave permanently, not just Pierpoint but the show altogether (like Gus, played by David Jonsson, who hasn't been seen since leaving for the US).
All of this is very compelling, and brilliant: especially when traumatic pasts are translated into deeply troubled relationships, when characters feel like they are searching for something genuine beyond the constraints, but can't quite get there, because they are primed to seek some kind of advantage in every interaction.
2020-, created by Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, starring Marisa Abela, Myha'la Herrold, Harry Lawtey, Ken Leung, David Jonsson, Freya Mavor, Conor MacNeill.
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