Warning: spoilers abound.
The newest season of HBO Max’s Industry is finally here, and its first episode promises a show that’s just getting bolder, uglier, and more morally bankrupt.
After the third season ended with Pierpoint being bought off and its London trading floor closing down, writers Mickey Down and Konrad Kay now bring the show out of the fictional investment bank’s cold halls and into a hellish political world that feels too real.
As expected, Industry doesn’t do a lot of hand-holding, and we’re immediately thrust into a scene where two new characters, Hayley Clay (Kiernan Shipka) and Jim Dycker (Charlie Heaton), hook up after a night out. Jim is revealed to be a financial journalist who slept with Hayley in a desperate attempt to gather information on the payment processing startup Tender, where she works as an executive assistant. Upon learning this, she chases him out with a knife.
In the new season’s political backdrop, the center-left Labour Party has won the 2024 general elections in the UK, and the new government has proposed an Online Safety Bill to crack down on pornography, potentially jeopardizing subscription aggregator Siren (think OnlyFans). The kicker: Tender processes payments for Siren, and its executives must now decide whether to continue servicing their controversial client or terminate their contracts.
Enter Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella), Tender’s forward-looking chief financial officer and longtime friend of CEO Jonah Atterbury (Kal Penn).
Jonah immediately becomes one of the episode’s most entertaining characters, with Penn cockily delivering lines like “Jerking off is recession-proof” and “Can I do another? Vodka this time. Bone dry, cold as space. Thanks.” But unlike Whitney, Jonah doesn’t want to cut ties with Siren, and rather likes the idea of Tender being the “PayPal of bukkake,” which is also the title of this episode.
Ultimately, Jonah’s crude behavior gets him ousted from his position, and Whitney steps in as interim CEO. One wonders now if, one episode in, this will be the last we’ll see of Jonah, or if this un-hostile takeover will come to bite Whitney in the ass later on.
We also learn that he is in talks with Yasmin (Marisa Abela) — now Lady Muck through her marriage to Henry (Kit Harington) — to give her husband a place in Tender, after his green energy company Lumi failed last season. Henry, however, seems to be unwell, and we see him crushing pills and dejectedly playing a harpsichord.
Reckoning with ‘Woke Shit’
Harper Stern (Myha’la) now leads a short-only fund at Mostyn Asset Management, owned by Henry’s godfather, Otto Mostyn (Roger Barclay). But after a hiccup at work, brought about by Harper’s hubris and impulsiveness, Otto harshly reminds her she is only a “progressive face” for his firm.
She then calls Eric Tao (Ken Leung), her former managing director at Pierpoint and, simultaneously, her career father figure and rival. Eric is divorced and retired, playing golf and living with a relatively younger girlfriend. But, still eager to make a name for himself after dedicating his whole career to Pierpoint, he and Harper strike up a plan to start their own firm.
The show’s political themes feel more pronounced than ever. Last season, we saw market maker Rishi Ramdani (Sagar Radia) spiral downward after he was reprimanded at work for his crude and casual misogyny. And in the seasons prior, the politics were relegated to subtext and setting.
But this season, the show totally ditches subtlety. Despite the Labour Party’s win, the world of Industry still mirrors the real-life Trump-era rejection of progressivism. When Jonah is fired from Tender, the board cites his “odor” as one of the myriad reasons. Male characters decry the fall of Siren because they love watching porn. And as Otto puts it bluntly in his argument with Harper, “That woke shit no longer moves the needle in this new world.”
Industry Season 4, Episode 1 is currently streaming on HBO Max.
