Industry Season Four Brings Prestige TV to Horny New Heights
This story contains spoilers for Industry‘s season four premiere.
Late in Industry’s third season, after Myha’la’s Harper Stern shanks her “best friend”—by virtue of sheer lack of viable options—her former mentor leans in and snarls, “You know I’m guessing you live with the feeling that you’re a monster. And now there’s nothing stopping you on your path to whatever behavior provides you with an externalized fantasy of what you really think of yourself every moment of every day. I want you to know from the bottom of my heart, that what you think about yourself is true.” The mentor is Eric Tao, reacting to his mentee effectively burning the setting for much of Industry’s first three seasons—the trading floor where Eric trained her—to the ground. Harper’s actions, speeding the self-inflicted demise of the institutional investment bank Pierpoint, and Eric’s prophecy, inform much of Industry’s thrilling new season.
Season 3 of the series was rightly called out on this website as the moment HBO’s deeply horny London-based financial-malfeasance soap opera made the leap from darling prestige underdog (and reportedly, one of the least-watched shows in HBO history) to watercooler appointment viewing for Americans conditioned to huddle around their devices every Sunday at 10 PM, honoring a tradition that dates back to Tony Soprano’s first commute home via the Lincoln Tunnel Helix.
The show has watched Myha’la’s steely, broken, lone-wolf contrarian Harper Stern scale the global financial market one discarded mentor at a time, a predatory Oedipus with an ironclad bullshit detector, a fungible personal history and a rubber ethical code, all of which makes her a killer worthy of Highsmith. Harper’s weapon of choice is the short sell, a bet that in a speculative market full of smoke and helium, the emperor is naked. Harper makes her “educated guesses” determining the pitch of the unstable market using the flimsy morality other liars and cheaters use to build fortunes on silt and manure. She plays the man, not the ball, and betting on the frailty of human nature has paid off season after season. It’s a perfect expression of Harper and the show’s wary eye toward capitalist machinery fueled by greed, avarice and pure survival instinct.
After season three went for the Emerald Fennell Ending—with Yasmin Kara-Hanani (the atom bomb Marisa Abela) taking the wealth, the estate and the survivors’ route “upstairs” with Henry Muck (returning DH Kit Harrington, plumbing the depths of his posh-cunt character’s soul)—Harper found an investor who shared her boundless enthusiasm for money made against the grain of conventional wisdom, who is fully bought into her unique investing strategy and will fund a move to New York, fully empowered to run her shop her way. There’s a version of that final note that could work as the premise for a primetime CBS hourlong drama: “This fall Kerry Washington is….The Short Seller”, fighting the corruption of the market with the power of mommy-issues-born cynicism one bad-faith player at a time. But of course Industry is too nimble to play at something so conventional. Season 4 is an espionage story and a detective story, one that is less LeCarre or Conan Doyle than creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay’s patent blend of Aaron Spelling, Adam Mckay, Armando Iannucci and Wes Craven, larded as it is with inscrutable MBA jargon and allusions to Kubrick.
The “target” for this season is Tender, which we are introduced to as a payment processor for smut, porn sites and gambling sites “proper” companies like PayPal won’t touch because of their (hypocritical) moral fiber. Their Zuckerberg figure (a chilling Max Minghella), has designs to turn the company into a tech behemoth, with help from poor regulatory oversight and the breathless hype of a market that refuses to learn lessons from history and loves nothing more than a good bubble. Harper eventually, inevitably sets her sights on the company, staking her future and credibility on Tender bluffing a full house while holding a pair of jacks. The tension of the season: Will she be able to unwind that position before Tender actually successfully fakes-it-until-it-makes-it as a blue chip company based on nothing but baseless, overinflated evaluation?
