Industry’s Special Circle of Hell

Sometimes I finish an episode of HBO’s Industry, and I can’t help but wonder: Are the traders who work at Pierpoint & Co. investment bank living in London or in Hell? I mean this literally. Lost debuted 20 years ago this week, and, for six seasons, viewers repeatedly wondered if this large cast of characters trapped on this mysterious island had, in fact, been dead the whole time. That show’s finale emphatically—if controversially—answered that they had been very much alive, but Industry, three seasons in, remains frustratingly mum on the question of whether or not Harper, Yasmin, Rob, Eric, and the rest of the gang are souls damned for eternity to a trading floor where they will be repeatedly punished for the sins they committed on Earth. Is this the Bad Place?

The counterpoint to this theory, of course, is that all of these characters—even the ones who’ve squandered their wealth on, say, horse races and country houses—are conventionally quite successful. How cursed could these people be? The answer is: plenty cursed. Has there been a more awful time to be had on television in the last four years than the time we’ve been able to spend amongst the hot, high, and hysterical salespeople and traders of Pierpoint? Has TV wealth ever felt this hollow? Has TV sex ever felt this cheap or exploitative? Have friendships and family on TV ever felt this mutually destructive? This season alone, Rob’s lover dies next to him only for her teenage daughter to proposition him the following morning; Yasmin’s louse of a father hooks up with a member of his yacht’s crew in his daughter’s bedroom, then physically attacks her, then emotionally attacks her, then falls off the yacht to his death in front of her; Rishi endures a Safdie-esque carnival of horrors as a result of his gambling addiction; Harper’s new partner turns on her; Harper turns on Pierpoint; and almost every friend betrays almost every other friend, sometimes more than once. They’re all guilty of pride, of vanity, of belief in a false (sterling) god. And they are all punished over and over.

The characters are all guilty of pride, of vanity, of belief in a false (sterling) god. And they are all punished over and over.

Industry follows the members of a first year “grad” cohort of stock traders at Pierpoint, the London branch of an American bank, as they wind their way up, off, or under the corporate ladder. Along the way, they make a lot of money, do a lot of drugs, have a lot of sex, and somehow still manage to show up to work the next morning. The drama debuted in 2020 to tepid reviews, but it returned two years later with a sense of revised purpose and energy. Its second season—which featured a much tighter focus on complicated plot machinations, a bit of a pullback from the show’s leering interest in young naked bodies, and a broad ensemble growing into their roles—cemented a cult following. And now, one episode from the end of the show’s excellent, soapy, pulpy third season, it’s seemingly ballooned into an actual following. HBO renewed the show for a fourth season earlier this month.

So why, all of a sudden, is this coke-fueled dirge of a show, this spectacle of ritualized punishment and misery, the beloved darling of HBO’s lineup? I don’t actually think that Industry is set in Hell, but I do think its hellishness is a perverse part of the appeal. Industry is an empty show that has arrived at an empty time for television, a time when viewers are willing to declare themselves full after being served increasingly paltry meals. A zombie pastiche of 25 years of prestige TV, Industry is a brutal indictment of how we all ended up here. Nostalgia, Don Draper once told us, means the pain from an old wound. What do you call the pain from a new one?

When its first season aired, Industry seemed something like a business-class Euphoria. Young, beautiful sociopaths, writhing around with each other, backstabbing, playing sexual mind games, doing lines, taking pills, but set in the world of high finance rather than high school. The appeal was the same either way: a maximalist rush of a show, a comedy (or maybe tragedy) of manners set amongst the rising Zoomer elite. The show’s first season largely bore this out. Thin on plot, the series relied on the mapping of its toxic ecosystem to hold attention. Like Euphoria, it built tiers of noxious relationships: the poisonous mentorship of Harper Stern by Eric Tao; the psychosexual love triangle between Harper, Yasmin, and Rob; Harper and Yasmin’s corrosive frenemyship; Gus’s simultaneous exploitation by Pierpoint and spurning by his lover, his status as a valuable token for the execs and a shameful secret for a manager a few floors below. And, building on these oil-slick networks, like Euphoria again, it crafted set piece after set piece of bacchanal and horror.

By its second season, which dialed further into corporate espionage and high-leverage trading, the show had transformed into something like Succession Jr. The aesthetics were always there: the stressful roving camera, the plate glass and functional office furniture interiors, the expensively bland button-downs and stiff skirt suits, the screens with their line graphs and their flashing lights, my God the screens everywhere. And audiences began to respond with the same parasocial flavor that used to be reserved for the Roys. But, instead of babygirl memes about Roman or girlboss memes about Shiv, it’s supercuts of Harper not taking shit or Yasmin telling somebody off. Viewers adopted Rob as a kind of Charlie Brown figure, iconic for always seeming to be having the worst day of his entire life. Industry became the HBO Sunday Night Club’s new favorite soap about the most terrible people on the planet.

Now in its third season, the show has both escaped and fully internalized these comparisons. Over the course of the season, we’ve followed Harper as she sets up a new firm with a ruthless new colleague, after being fired from Pierpoint; Yasmin, as she becomes a paparazzi target after her father was accused of embezzlement and then disappeared; Rob, as he unsuccessfully midwifes the launch of a new green energy start-up; and Eric, as he struggles to balance the thrill of high-stakes salesmanship with the corporate responsibilities of his new status as partner. Industry has now diversified its portfolio of ways to fuck up its characters.

Industry’s mix of the sensibilities of both Euphoria and Succession might be a limitation, though one that also allows it reach further than those shows into the void. Last year, I wrote about how Succession represented the beginning of a new era of prestige television, arriving at the end of a decade or so of auteur dramedies and post–Game of Thrones TV epics. Industry feels new, but its newness is not about new ideas so much as it is a lack of new ideas. This year has seen a new season of a wan Game of Thrones spin-off that has struggled to approximate the detailed devastation of the original, a new season of a Lord of the Rings prequel nobody asked for, and Agatha All Along, a perfectly pleasant spin-off of a spin-off of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a show winking so hard you can hear its bones snapping. As I write these words, there is even a new Matlock reboot airing on CBS. Industry is the sort of prestige drama that belongs to this era of microwave leftovers. I don’t mean to say the show is wholly unoriginal, or at least I don’t mean to say that its unoriginality is a negative feature. But I do think that this show, very deliberately, occasionally explicitly, frequently brilliantly, is built around nothing. Succession represented an era of TV that became exhausted and died; Industry is perhaps the first show of a new undead era. It’s a body so pumped full of drugs and electricity that it can’t help but twitch with seeming life.

Industry is a prestige drama for the era of microwave leftovers. It is a show very deliberately, occasionally explicitly, frequently brilliantly, built around nothing.

Industry is not just a variation of Euphoria and Succession, but of many, many other prestige classics, as well. The show cribs Breaking Bad’s mercilessness toward its characters and its audience; it steals Girls’ messy roommates structure from season to season, as well as Lena Dunham’s facility with standalone character episodes (Dunham directed the show’s pilot); it echoes The Good Wife’s picture of executive ruthlessness and the easy way jealousy transforms into desire; it shares The Wire’s investment in systems of power; it even lifts the conspicuous literariness of its dialogue from David Milch’s Deadwood.

Then, there’s Mad Men. From the drugs to the adultery to the objectification of young female office workers to the countless scenes of workplace humiliation to the dramatic importance of elevators, Pierpoint owes a profound debt to Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. But, importantly, the show isn’t merely a cover version, an uncannily canned take on familiar materials. Mad Men’s critique of midcentury consumerism and corporate culture was shot through, at every moment, with the irony that its main characters understood themselves as artists. The work of the agency, for Peggy and Don, at least, was to create art that spoke to the people who encountered it, made them feel understood, seen, in a way that they couldn’t be otherwise. As an extended metaphor for the writers’ own creative process, a meditation on making art within the constraints of a commercial medium, this theme was present everywhere from the Rothko on Bert Cooper’s wall to the sketches in Don’s desk.

Industry most overtly replicated the relationship between Peggy and Don in its establishment of Harper and Eric. Played by two of the most ferocious actors on any show right now—Myha’la and Ken Leung—their relationship is the vacant heart at the center of the show. Like Peggy and Don, they are intimately tied by secret knowledge of each other, Harper wants nothing more than to please Eric and also destroy him, and the genuine love and craven manipulation that characterizes their bond sets the moral tone for everything else in the series. But Harper and Eric don’t make art, even compromised art. They don’t even always make money. In fact, what they actually do is never really all that meaningfully clear to the viewer. (A key point of Industry’s style guide is that viewers never really need to know what’s actually going on, so long as they feel the correct emotion—excitement or despair—about it.) Mad Men used the cartoon art form of advertising to tell stories about what it’s like to make art in general; Industry uses finance to tell stories about what? Nothing.

Over the years that we’ve been following Industry’s stories about asset management and finance, we’ve also witnessed the final stages of TV’s own financialization as an industry.

In the third season, nothingness is a distinct theme. When someone accuses start-up fraudster Henry (Kit Harrington) of building his company on nothing, he replies, indignantly, “Everything’s built on nothing. That’s how you build something. You talk it into becoming!” In that same episode, Eric describes the work traders do at Pierpoint in a similar way: “This is all smoke and mirrors, but it’s indivisible from reality, so we make reality.” In one sense, we might say that this is Industry telling on itself. Mad Men was about art, Succession is about family, but this is just about naked actors and generating the feeling of a car chase out of a series of phone calls. There’s nothing to say, but you’ve got to say something.

On the other hand, this is a show that doesn’t need the comfort blanket of a subtextual discourse about art and artistry. It’s a show about vacuousness in a vacuous time, a show about corruption in a corrupt time, a show about endemic lack of imagination in an unimaginative time. Over the years that we’ve been following Industry’s stories about asset management and finance, we’ve also witnessed the final stages of TV’s own financialization as an industry. As Daniel Bessner wrote recently, “While prestige TV was climbing the rungs of the culture … financial firms had been infiltrating the business, moving to reduce risk and maximize efficiency at all costs.” If the HBO that produced The Sopranos was a revolution, the HBO that produces Industry is an asset. BlackRock, as a stakeholder in Warner Bros Discovery, is not a patron of the arts. The ghastly emptiness Industry reveals to us on-screen is precisely the same emptiness that produced it.

We can figure out how to meme Yasmin or convince yourself to care about Eric’s divorce or Harper’s lost brother or whether the short is going to pay off. But that’s not the point. Industry’s brutality is useful, even boldly revelatory, in the way it refuses to romanticize its subjects. “I’m bored, working for this dictatorship of dying men,” one character tells another as she leaves Pierpoint for the last time. There’s nothing left for anyone here. Industry is Hell. It’s all over. It’s never going to end.