20 January 2026

Industry likes money too much

Do I hate the show, or do I hate Britain?

Industry, HBO’s sleeper hit series about investment banking, has changed a fair bit since the first season arrived in late 2020. Back then, the focus of the show was squarely on the trading floor at Pierpoint, the London bank where a group of new trainees were trying to muscle their way into permanent jobs. There was a lot of jargon, a lot of drugs and a high stench of machismo and office cubicle sex. As the show has gone on, the lens has widened. At the end of the third season, Pierpoint’s trading floors were cleared out for good when the bank was subsumed by an Egyptian investment firm called Al-Mi’raj. So season four follows ex-Pierpointers like Harper, Yasmin and Eric to see where life takes them next, allowing the show to break out of the confines of Canary Wharf and go as far afield as Accra and Vienna.

Fresh off the collapse of his green energy company Lumi and his failure to pivot into politics, Henry Muck, an aristocrat introduced in series three, has a new venture: a fintech outfit called Tender. Harper and Yasmin are pitted against each other, which always yields satisfying drama for the show. Yasmin, now married to Muck, desperately wants his business to succeed and dredge him up from the depths of his failure-induced depression, and Harper sees an opportunity to short the company.

Industry is one of the best shows currently on television. You can find this opinion in more or less any publication that covers TV. I know that by several important metrics, Industry is good. It is well-written, ballsy and exciting. The relationships between the central characters, particularly Harper and Yasmin and Harper and Eric, are complex and satisfying. It has gone from strength to strength with each passing series in all of these regards. But I just can’t bring myself to like it.

Why? It’s not the anxiety-inducing excesses and runaway train feeling of some of the storylines, where we watch characters like Rishi destroy themselves at speed. That is not a pleasant experience as a viewer – and for the sake of your blood pressure I can’t recommend watching more than a couple of episodes back to back – but it is an engaging one. It’s not the complexities of the actual trading that the characters are engaging in. I am one of those people who comes within touching distance of understanding how finance works for the duration of the time they are watching The Big Short and then wakes up the following morning none the wiser, but that doesn’t really get in the way of enjoying Industry. The terminology washes over you easily enough, if you’re not a finance-type, and you still broadly understand what’s going on. I do find the show’s desire to seem salacious with ever more outré ways in which people can seem miserable while having sex a bit tiresome. But that’s not it either.

There’s a line in Rebecca Mead’s recent New Yorker profile of Industry’s creators, Konrad Kay and Mickey Down, that has stuck in my mind as I’ve been watching this new series. “More than one friend or acquaintance of the pair told me it was important to understand that Industry is not a satire, and that the characters’ ambition – and their pleasure in material wealth – is shared by the show’s creators”. Kay and Down were both, briefly, bankers themselves. And it’s this, I think, that shines through when you’re watching Industry, and means I can’t find it in myself to enjoy doing so. Industry is a programme that depicts the terrible possible consequences of pursuing money and power without recourse to morality, but you don’t get the sense that the people making it think money or power are not worthy goals. An affection for this world is palpable. Scammers give monologues about their bold business manoeuvres as an electro cover of “We Could Be Heroes” plays. Harper, the nearest thing the show has to a hero, swans around in fierce designer suits with shoulder pads as she plays the market. It is implied that she is a cool person, and there is something aspirational and desirable about accruing as much money as possible. I don’t enjoy spending time with these characters, and can’t find it in myself to care whether any of them win or lose, when the game they have chosen to play is so nakedly repellant.

Which leads me to wonder whether what I am actually hating, when I hate Industry, is Britain. Can I really lay it at the door of Industry that the UK is a country run by profit monsters for profit monsters? No. Albeit in a heightened-for-TV way, the show does accurately reflect how people with money and a desire for yet more money perpetually manage to land on their feet. But I still don’t have to like watching it.

[Further reading: Hamnet fails Shakespeare]