Industry Blew Up the Bank—Then Got Right Back to Work
Last we left Industry, the acclaimed HBO series about the London office of an illustrious American bank, the illustrious bank in question had been sold off to a Gulf-state sovereign wealth fund and its principal characters had been scattered to the wind. If the season finale felt like the end of something, that was by design—the culmination of perhaps the first version of the show. “We were trying to basically scorch the earth because we didn’t think we were coming back,” says Industry cocreator Konrad Kay.
When Industry premiered in 2020, it was a worm’s-eye view of the young strivers in London banking, populated by a cast of unknowns. The hook of season one was not just faithfully rendering the stakes of being a bottom-feeder in an industry of note—botching a salad order, showing up to work hungover, striking out with a coworker—but articulating the feeling of being on the precipice…. Of having made it through one door, and then maybe another, and arriving in the arena of real-world action for the first time. Sex, money, work. The semblance of freedom. Like Mad Men before it, the universe, for all intents and purposes, was the office. When Industry first arrived, in the depths of COVID, it had the double effect of showcasing a seductive life outside of lockdown and being consumed by viewers in isolation. In this way, it was like a secret whispered in one’s ear while on drugs in a nightclub. Did this show really exist or did I hallucinate it? The proprietary sensation was an illusion—this was an HBO show. But nobody seemed to be out in the world talking about it with each other.
When Industry returned in 2022, deliciously knowing about how its characters would’ve experienced (and gotten rich off of) COVID, the show started to expand its knowingness to other realms of interest. By season three, Industry was exploding with Things to Say not just about the world of high finance in the UK but of the overlapping sectors of politics, media, and tech (and the subterranean forces of sex, class, money, and power shaping them). The third season’s final episode could’ve served as a satisfying series finale—but there was also a sense that the show had finally reached the point where it could truly be about the stuff it was always secretly most interested in.
“The show was conceived and pitched as the world of the powerful told through the lens of people without power,” says Mickey Down, the show’s other cocreator. “Now, these characters have power.”
When we zoom out from the bank, the show seems to argue in its third season, the picture becomes more complex, but also simpler: British society is controlled by overlapping industries, interests, and players, all of whom find themselves inevitably, and often literally, in the same rooms—usually at a private club in London or a manor house in the countryside—determining the fate of a nation over martinis, cocaine, and hubris.
Our lead characters, whom we met fresh out of university and competing for entry-level positions, are, after five years, now in these rooms, having ascended to privileged positions through talent, ambition, and sex appeal. The show’s central pair, Marisa Abela (Yasmin) and Myha’la (Harper), have grown up with their characters, beginning on Industry right out of drama school—just as their characters begin with the bank right out of university—and shedding their newcomer status in the process. Both actors, each 29, are married now. They are starring in films, fronting fashion campaigns. Though they, like Yasmin and Harper, are now main characters themselves, the wholesale transformation in the show may have only been possible because of Industry’s need to start with a blank canvas.
