Giving In to the "Delightfully Snide" Varlets and Vixens of "Industry"

Let’s postulate for a moment that you or I might have overdone New Year’s Eve– may have just ridden out a two-day hangover leading into Dry January.  Congrats and condolences. But if you follow the doings of the young traders on the bustling floor of the Pierpoint investment bank on HBO MAX’s “Industry,” you know that for them that kind of night is more or less…Tuesday.

 Fair warning that the following will contain what some call “light” spoilers. But be assured that at least the denser financial working which are the drama-inciting incidents of the show will not be detailed—it’s all too complex for most of us, the toolkit of market and currency manipulation as done by investment bank traders (and their analysts).  Even when pricking up your ears for many of their conversations, an admiring correspondent for New York’s Vulture site promises, “You will not understand a single word.”  

That’s an exaggeration of course—maybe you’re a current or sometime trader yourself. Having briefly workshopped a memoir notion with a storied hedgie, I know bits of argot.  Thankfully the real sinew of the show isn’t the exchanges of money, with all their angry threats and giddy prospects, but the now interlocking, now ripped-to-shreds relationships of the (mostly) young principal players. Even the Financial Times called the writers’ cagey elisions of the techy jargon a mere “quibble — on the whole, the writing is delightfully snide, while political correctness is nowhere.”

“Industry” is not for family viewing, oh no. Generally attractive in the extreme, the show’s performers are mostly newly discovered– though now sudden stars– and tend to have, if you’ll forgive the phrase, mad rizz. Amidst the psychic tumult, the greed and fear, they act on such attraction. You maybe don’t want your kid to see this show--even if your kid is 32. (The revenge of the older characters is to dunk on the kids; two of the best recurring characters are played by Sarah Goldberg, as the remorseless and infinitely chilly short-seller Petra, and Jay Duplass as the charismatically conscience-free Jesse Bloom, a sweatpants-and sneakers kind of guy the young aspirants can’t help but admire for his  infamous, shifty trading games during the pandemic.)

 Perhaps you’ve heard of a Musk-like character? Well, is Henry Muck the right kind of near-homophone as a name? Handed a character basket of jagged neuroses and the self- worship to power through them, Game of Thrones’ Kit Harington is anything but stunt casting as he wobbles between glugging ayuhasca and serving as skeleton key to a world of old-school privilege. The finance and publishing mandarins who are spawn of the upper-class university set are all too ready to spit on their hand and bugger the querulous public.

 Did we mention the coke and sex?  These frenemies with benefits give the lie to the idea that snorting and snogging are somehow inimical. Just about everything the swains and silk-shirted girls do in the off hours—but really, are there any off hours in a cell phone culture?—is decidedly Not Safe for Work. These people are certainly Not Safe At Work, amidst the limo seats and loo stalls, scarfing drugs, mingling sex with humiliation for both parties. 

Also unsafe is one’s job (and as shown in season one as a stiff drink of real consequences, one’s very life). The fate of one frenziedly spiraling, fresh trading desk recruit in season one leads to a later recall it hurts to watch when compulsively bollocking numbers wizard  Rishi (Saga Radia)  goes fully entropic in an episode devoted mostly to him. (Turn on subtitles to follow the japes as Rishi spouts away, often off-camera, in many scenes). 

There’s a reason that three of the talented Vulture reviewing crew put “Industry”’s season three on their 2024 year-end best lists; it’s easy to keep the episodes skipping along, as one day’s king might be the next day’s knave. (The traders don’t sleep much either; almost anybody on the call sheet is seen  doing enough chop to have matching  holes in their septum before long. It’s a kind of pocket-lint symbolism—on this show, the doping is just another aspect of anguished, reckless spending and getting. 

If I haven’t sold that all this frenetic activity is almost farcically entertaining, there’s plenty of time to catch up to the autumn 2024 season three run, now that HBO signed the series up for a fourth season. So, it’s recommended but as Bill Murray’s Jeff says to Dustin Hoffman’s Michael in “Tootsie,” “I’m just afraid that you're going to burn in Hell for all this.”

It's probably unwise to deeply inhale the more toxic fumes the show gives off; while we might find the key personalities to be compromised and feckless, they are constantly swaying to the music that touches us all in some inner room. The contention is not so much greed is good, but that winning, sheerly winning, is the best rebuke to a system built for the elites--and more granularly, built to serve the still-intact British class structure.  Showrunners Mickey Down and Konrad Kay are a story in their own right, former Oxfordians (thus by definition, lads of privilege) who edited the school paper and entered the working world almost by chance with a rather fleeting stretch of working in finance. 

Despite the ferociously high-tech setting that is the Pierpoint trading floor, the work vibe is at once loose (with psychotic features) and also fraught with terror of costly mistakes. Insults are the lingua franca, aimed most resoundingly towards the new traders whose number will be halved by the firm’s annual “reduction in force.” Resentments flare up, then die with little consequence. (Revenge works best when covert backstabbings can be plotted). The soaring ceiling of the authentically if fictionally functional set (planted in a cavernous room in Cardiff, Wales but meant to be in London’s City financial district) can’t mask the claustrophobic elbow-to-elbow deak array as occupied by varying wrangling specialists. In full cry the population resembles a large orchestra playing a rushing Shostakovich scherzo passage. (The show’s theme music is derived from DJ/composer Nathan Micay and carries a certain urgency that is leavened frequently by music supervisor Ollie White’s hiply ironic pop selections, notably  Swan Lingo’s “Can’t See Your Face Anymore.”)

 An achievement by the show runners (and their writers’ room that includes finance savants) is to liberally hand out plot points and bravura scenes to the entire gaggle of castmates.

Perhaps no dynamic is better exploited than that between Ken Leung’s Eric Tao—a veteran trader who has for some time avoided getting kicked upstairs to management—and his new protégé Harper, as played by Myha’la with an almost gymnastic series of persona vaults and the occasional un-stuck landing.  “Isn’t it lucky that no one is ever satisfied,” Eric says of their scheming cohort, and if that’s the guiding mantra of the show, the darker hues that lend it depth reside in his follow-up to her : “Are we the marks?” 

Having been bludgeoned by the many raves for the show, I started with season three, daring it to lose me. Well, in a week of stolen bingeing time immediately followed the season three finale, I had churned through the rest, enjoying  two and three all the more for the reverse engineering of the storylines.  Exemplary of that is the bitterly etched backstory of Marisa Abela’s Yasmin (some will have seen her doing her own singing in the Amy Winehouse biopic, “Back to Black”), which is finally vouchsafed in the lattermost  episodes. If the writers’ room and the show’s cabal of directors has fallen in love with her attractiveness and thrown much screen time her way, it’s hard to blame them. 

Yasmin’s  self-awareness doesn’t’ really act as a drag on what she calls her “polyamorous” nature;  in closing this rant of recommendation, perhaps it’s not indiscreet to quote a realization from Yasmin that definitely pays off around cliff-hanger time: “I’m good at making people feel like I love them.” 

Haven’t we all known someone like that?