HBO’s Industry: “Euphoria, but in a bank”

At the time of writing, Industry has neither been cancelled nor confirmed for a third season. If there isn’t a third season, fans are going to be very unhappy and that’s an understatement. There are at least three characters whose storylines ended on sky high tension and we demand answers, HBO.

Like Succession, Billions and Devils, all streaming on Showmax, Industry is set in the world of finance, banking and hedge funds. The inner workings of such things, and how fortunes are made and lost in the blink of an eye, is mind boggling to the average person who can barely understand how their credit card works. On the plus side of living on the edge of monetary ruin, you don’t care if your account is hacked because there’s nothing there to steal.

The company is Pierpoint & Co, and the core cast comprises analysts who are frighteningly young to be handing millions and billions of pounds and dollars, but also unnervingly brilliant in their understanding of how markets work. The environment is outrageously stressful – even billionaires get annoyed when their stocks plummet – and these 20-somethings blow off steam by doing drugs almost all the time, and constantly sleeping with each other.

These scenarios were presented in Season 1, and are dialled up several notches in Season 2. They openly and casually snort lines of coke as a matter of course, and there are zero sexual boundaries. In the car with your colleague? Of course. With your new boss of the same gender (a first time)? Absolutely. In the bathroom with another colleague at his wedding? Oh, heck, yeah. How about your client? Why not? That none of these has a healthy outcome, and indeed, the often awkward consequences, doesn’t stop them.

For a Season 1 recap, click here. There are spoilers if you haven’t watched of course, but it is available to stream right now on Showmax, so set aside the time. The recap is more for those who did watch the first season but need a refresher. We’ve watched a lot of stuff in the intervening two years.

The culture at Pierpoint is extremely toxic and in Season 2, nothing has changed, despite the problems that were exposed in Season 1. As a woman, it’s perhaps easy to immediately surmise it’s a male problem, but Yasmin (Marisa Abela) is both victim and perpetrator. New character Celeste (Katrine de Candole), older and more experienced than the newbies, is as predatory and inappropriate as Nicole (Sarah Parish), a client who is revealed now to be a serial crotch grabber (with varying results). The abuse of power is not limited to any one gender.

At the centre of the show is Harper Stern (Myha’la Herrold), who is super intelligent, talented at the job, and ruthlessly self-serving, but she’s hiding some secrets, the deepest of which is known to her supervisor Eric Tao (Ken Leung).

Their relationship is unusual and complex, ranging from insinuations of harassment to insubordination to collaboration when they attempt to go rogue. He affectionately calls her “Harpsichord”, and could well be her only ally after she’s burned bridges with female colleagues.

In Season 2, Harper meets one of the world’s richest men, Jesse Bloom (Jay Duplass), who made a fortune on the back of Covid. They encounter each other in a hotel, apparently each not knowing who the other is. But Harper sees the opportunity and he becomes her client. The ups and downs of this play out through the season. Is he sincere? Is he a good guy? Or is it all just a sham, and arrogance, that we have come to expect from the likes of him? 

After crashing and burning at the end of Season 1, Robert (Harry Lawtey) has quit drinking and drugs for the most part. He does fall off the wagon in spectacular and humiliating fashion at one point though. Even sober, he makes some serious errors of judgement, and in the Season 2 finale he must surely be questioning these and how he will live with them.

Yasmin. Oh, Yasmin. Nothing goes as well as she hopes this entire season. First, she loses her biggest, most lucrative client Maxim (Nicholas Bishop) but makes up for it by sleeping with him a couple of times. He’s also a lifelong friend, so complicated much?

Her father (Adam Levy) makes an appearance and this leads to all manner of intricacies as she questions his personal life and affairs as he is on the brink of divorce from her mother, as well as bidding to manage the family fortune. Daddy lays some harsh truths on her, and the season ends with her in circumstances which were unimaginable before. Her personal life choices ain’t so great either.

After making some spectacular and exciting (even if you don’t understand the finer details) trades in the early part of the season, Harper loses favour later on – with her new superior, the suave Danny (Alex Alomar Akpobome) and with Jesse, which can be construed as insider trading, a disaster. The final scene is a jaw-dropping revelation, with Eric delivering the last devastating line.

These are all reasons we absolutely must have a third season. Industry is insane, like Euphoria but in a bank. The Guardian says it’s “TV as stressful as drinking 10 espressos then speaking in public, naked” which is a fair assessment. “The show only gets better as everyone’s behaviour, deliciously, gets worse and worse,” writes Rebecca Nicholson. Her review nails it, no need to read any others.