Industry Is the Soapy, Sleazy Spectacle Prestige TV Is Missing
Kyndall Cunningham is a culture writer interested in reality TV, movies, pop music, Black media, and celebrity culture. Previously, she wrote for the Daily Beast and contributed to several publications, including Vulture, W Magazine, and Bitch Media.
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Industry, now in its third season, has lived in the shadow of two HBO juggernauts, Euphoria and Succession, for the past four years. Its similarities with Succession in particular — British creators, corporate settings, despicable characters, acerbic dialogue, gray-toned palettes — have made it difficult for the show about young, ketamine-snorting bankers to capture everyone’s attention.
But now that it’s been said — including on this very website — that the overall quality of scripted television is not what it once was, it seems like a perfect time for an ever-improving show to reset our expectations for what prestige TV can be.
The well-touted notion that Industry is an heir to Succession seems like good marketing. And the show’s writers and co-creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay have embraced the comparisons with a sense of humor. “If Industry had the same arc [as Succession], me and Mickey would be quite happy,” Kay told the Daily Beast in 2022. In the season two finale, they even inserted a winking reference to Kendall Roy. Vulture also released a profile of the show’s casts and creators titled “Can Industry succeed Succession?” as the new season takes on Succession’s former Sunday time slot.
However, the suggestion that these two series scratch the same itch or that Industry is aiming to be like Succession feels like critics’ underselling of the show. While Industry has all the markers of a sophisticated, bougie drama, it feels more spiritually akin to a messy teen soap like Gossip Girl.
That certainly isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s exactly what this overly brooding, monotonous state of television needs. One of the most impressive things about Industry is how it avoids many of prestige TV’s reigning problems. While supposedly high-brow shows have become predictable, with their focus on trauma and grief as main qualities of the human experience, Industry seems to be one of the few shows interested in offering viewers naughtiness and pleasure.
The conventions of “prestige TV” have become limiting … and boring
Industry’s first season followed a group of post-graduates — with the exception of protagonist Harper Stern (Myha’la), whose transcript is a little less complete than her bosses understand — vying for permanent positions at the fictional investment bank Pierpoint & Co. in London. Right away, they’re met with abuse and impossible demands from tyrannical bosses and inappropriate colleagues, including the hair-raising sales manager Eric Tao (Ken Leung).
The onscreen depravity isn’t limited to Pierpoint’s higher-ups, though. The show’s promising young bankers — particularly Harper and publishing heir Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) — play all sorts of mental and sexual games with each other and their peers to climb the corporate ladder. Almost every interaction is deceptive or transactional. Vulnerability can rarely be trusted.
Actors Myha’la and Sarah Goldberg in Industry season three.
HBO
On a show about depraved, broken people, it’s refreshing that Down and Kay refrain from relying on a narrative device that’s become a rather tiring cliché in prestige television — the trauma plot. In a 2021 New Yorker essay, Parul Sehgal wrote about the prevalent use of a single devastating backstory to easily explain the totality of characters, leaving little mystery and denying consumers a morally complicated experience. “The trauma plot flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom, and, in turn, instructs and insists upon its moral authority,” she wrote.
This sense of predictability — and simplicity — has lessened the impact of quite a few shows recently, like the buzzy Netflix miniseries Baby Reindeer. Despite the miniseries’ potential to go into strange and ambiguous directions, it offers a pretty obvious theory in the end about the show’s troubling stalker, Martha — she had a bad childhood.
In other cases, the excessive use of backstory can inhibit plot movement or character development. Take Euphoria, for example, maybe the biggest offender in this regard. For its first two seasons, the show was so concerned with revisiting its characters’ devastating pasts that it had no idea where they were going in the show’s present. As a result, season two was meandering and motionless, hammering down on the same character details. It wasn’t much of a surprise that Sam Levinson’s follow-up miniseries The Idol quickly fell apart on much the same basis.
Similar comments were made about the latest season of The Bear, which landed as a disappointment among fans and critics. In a review for Slate, writer Jack Hamilton criticized the season’s “incessant use of flashbacks” to avoid “the show itself actually moving forward.”
It’s not that the characters in Industry aren’t deeply troubled by their upbringings and familial relationships. For example, Harper and Yasmin’s colleague Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey) has vaguely described mommy issues that lead to an inappropriate relationship with a predatory woman client at Pierpoint and probably his submissive sexual dynamic with Yasmin. Harper is the product of an abusive mom. It’s also evident that bad boss Eric’s lust for dominance comes from being perceived and underestimated as a “diversity hire” throughout his career.
The writers never dwell on this information for too long though, nor do they feed us that many details. The story still functions, even if these personal details never completely explain why these reckless 20-somethings and their mean supervisors are the way they are. Instead, they propel the characters forward, leading to exciting plot turns and head-scratching decisions.
The best case of this is the portrayal of Yasmin’s fractured relationship with her father (Adam Levy). A lazier show would spend an inordinate amount of time revisiting the wounds Yasmine accrued from her dad during her childhood. Instead, Yasmine’s daddy issues are an obstacle she has to escape in the present. When she discovers her father’s sexual misconduct in season two, it provides a mirror for a sexual relationship she has with a mentor at Pierpoint and when she embarks on her own power trip as she makes moves within the company. In season three, her father’s legal troubles come back to haunt her, causing her to negotiate her morals once again.
In all of its chaos, Industry hasn’t lost sight of what makes it good
As critics have unanimously stated, season three is arguably Industry’s best offering yet. After being ousted from Pierpoint in the second season finale, Harper has a new job and a new manager, Petra Koenig (Sarah Goldberg) to test with her risky, often legally dubious business moves. Meanwhile, at Pierpoint, the company invests in a new client, a green-energy company called Lumi founded by an incompetent CEO Henry Muck (Kit Harington), which triggers an avalanche of problems at the bank.
While Harper is still fighting a one-sided war with Tao and Pierpoint, her former co-workers seem a bit more deflated and disillusioned than in previous seasons. Tao is confronted with how disempowering his new position as a partner at Pierpoint actually is. Yasmin realizes that she can’t overcome the lifelong curse of coming from a messed-up family through her work. Arguably, the best episode of the season is centered on Pierpoint associate Rishi Ramdani (Sagar Radia), whose greed (and dickishness) finally reaches a tipping point.
Overall, Kay and Down have become more skilled at executing plotlines, experimenting with cinematography, and nailing the show’s frenetic pacing. While season two was a little heavy-handed with its commentary on representational politics and “glass ceiling” feminism, season three feels light on its feet.
Actors Harry Lawtey and Kit Harington in Industry season three.
HBO
Stress and turmoil may still define these characters’ lives, but watching them navigate their mostly self-inflicted problems is surprisingly more fun and funny this time around. The writers seem more interested in creating amusing (but smart) plotlines for entertainment’s sake rather than hammering down on the show’s already underlying thesis on the pitfalls of capitalism. At the end of the day, Industry is a show about horny, foolish, mostly young adults who desperately need therapy.
The fact that Industry has gotten better over time is a huge relief. At this point, we’ve watched several popular, critically acclaimed shows — The Bear, Atlanta, Killing Eve, Big Little Lies, etc. — lose their way after one or two good seasons. (I might be the only person who thinks that Succession got worse after season two.) The constraints of streaming have allowed creators to become more self-indulgent in their work. Certain shows have felt more focused on experimenting with structure to the point where it doesn’t feel like they’re interested in making TV anymore — rather, college-level film projects. Others seem to bend to the demands of social media, like Succession, which gradually lost its “eat the rich” bite in favor of sympathizing with fan-favorite characters.
Thankfully, Industry hasn’t succumbed to any of these tendencies yet — maybe, in part, because it hasn’t been showered with awards or received a large amount of attention. Instead, the show keeps reflecting what prestige TV still has the potential to be in an era of forgettable television — engrossing characters, smart storytelling, and a respect for the medium as we knew it before Netflix and Twitter.