In ‘Industry’ Season Four, Zillenials and Zoomers Feel Their Age
A maxim: when the British get old, they become pathetic; when Americans get old, they go psycho.
Fitting then that the fourth season of Industry, a British show with a thrashing American heart, blends the pathetic and the feral in ways that depart from the bildungsroman—to use an Eton and Balliol approved word—of the first three seasons.
This season’s betrayals operate at a higher speed. Tender co-founder Whitney Halberstram’s (Max Minghella)—this season’s new central character and villain—betrays Jonah (Kal Penn) in the premiere, “PayPal of Bukkake,” at a chickenshit velocity that makes Eric Tao’s betrayal of Adler at the end of season three seem positively glacial. From gaslighting an old colleague with brain cancer on the grand corporate stage to ducking eye contact like a punk as you give the boot to your co-founder for the sins of porn-y banter and exhaling the vapors of martinis “cold as space,” the treacheries in season four feel degraded and pettier.
Character churn is up too. In place of Rob’s gradual processing and final acceptance of his fraught relationship with his mother last season—aided by a just-so dose of hallucinogens—we have Henry Muck (Kit Harington) speedrunning, in a single episode, through intravenous drug use, a nepo-baby meltdown at his own fancy-dress birthday party, going on the lash with his father’s ghost, and railing starved-for-love Yasmin at daybreak.
The end of season 3 presented Otto Mostyn as the ne plus ultra of Industry overlords, a sinister, fish-gutting, King-Lear-quoting aristocratic who sees himself and Harper as bandits both. In season 4? Brief little diva-off with Harper while wearing an ermine robe, bragging about how he can be ableist again, before giving us a sassy turn and dematerializing into royal shadows. When we see him again? Getting dreary head on an overstuffed couch and jangling a tin of mints during what is his likely two-month refractory period. I knew Stringer Bell. He was a friend of mine. And Otto, you are no Stringer Bell.
The homages are more obvious this time around too. Jim Dycker (Charlie Heaton)’s desperate, coked-out, and deeply sad monologue in “1000 Yoots, 1 Marilyn” is essentially a Zillenial xerox of Tom Wilkinson’s opening monologue in Michael Clayton; showrunners Mickey Down and Konrad Kay have said that the work of Tony Gilroy is an angel that floats above this season. And how are our final moments with Rishi (Sagar Radia) in that same episode anything other than an Uncut Gems or Good Time crash ending for a character whose previous bottom was his wife being murdered in front of him? Muck’s suicide attempt in a vintage Jaguar in “The Commander and the Grey Lady” was nearly identical to Lane Pryce’s first failed attempt on Mad Men. Immature artists borrow, mature artists steal, a very fancy American poet who cosplayed as British once wrote.
That’s not to say that this season isn’t a success. The show remains mesmerizing, and deeply of-the-moment in its speed and its ruthlessness and its flashes of dark glee. Threesomes in rooms where the paintings of Adolf Hitler look down on the participants. Whitney slowly tipping over a chair in his office then barking for Hayley (Kiernan Shipka) to come fix it. The absurdity, in “Eyes Without a Face,” of the security guards in the empty building in Accra, forever picking up and dropping the phone into its receiver.
Kit Harington’s performance as Muck is remarkable: I assumed after seeing him only in Game of Thrones and a wretched video game adaptation sequel (Silent Hill: Revelation) that his range was sad boy plus, a damp dude fated to play opposite the pyrotechnic types. I was wrong. I don’t want to overvalue the role that Muck’s biographical overlaps with Harington’s own life details (historic families; in recovery for alcohol misuse; open about their mental health struggles) might play in Harington absolutely magnetizing the season, but I do get a whiff of Eminem-in-8–Mile, of Lady Gaga-in-A–Star–Is–Born. That’s a compliment. Tensions of life and of art are pinging like tuning fork tines in Harington’s work here, and when Muck begins to cycle between jolts of confidence and maudlin loafing, few other performances on TV can match it.
