CashNews.co
With Succession gone, Industry (BBC One/HBO), the finance drama set in the world of a London investment bank, is now one of HBO’s very few contemporary dramas. Prestige TV has, in the main, veered towards literary fantasy, perhaps because you can cleave to source material with a pre-existing fanbase and mitigate the risk of big TV’s huge set-up costs. Industry shows that there is another way – it has long been a talked-about show that no one watched. This season elevates it to another plane entirely.
In part that’s because the writers, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, have taken the story beyond its season one and two confines. Initially, it was an insulated tale of five graduates battling it out for a permanent job at a major investment bank: who would win the day, and what lengths would they go to?
It was classic battle royale territory, brilliantly peopled with privileged characters with generational wealth set against barrow boys and upstarts. But it came with obvious limits. Series two, therefore, began to show not how you got a job but what that job entailed. Dodgy deals with duplicitous financiers. Compromises and conscience-scraping to shin-up the greasy pole. All fuelled by the glint of filthy lucre. None of it, however, went too far beyond the trading floor of Pierpoint & Co, Industry’s gleaming, monolithic, fictional British-American investment bank.
Series three is therefore a breakout season in several senses, principally because we follow Harper (Myha’la) to another job at an ethical investor, Yasmin (Marisa Abela) into a family scandal with her disgraced publishing mogul father and Robert (Harry Lawtey) into the murky embrace of the British Establishment. The show has grown in scope and ambition, while never forgetting its roots as a stylish workplace drama. Taking any show “beyond the precinct” is always a gamble, and normally a mistake.