If you miss the colorful and profane world of Successiona show where most of the characters would gladly sell their souls for power and money, then you should watch HBO Max. Industry. While they share some similarities (both come from British creators and follow a group of antiheroic characters in a world of hyper-wealth), Industry It focuses even more on the inhuman ambition that drives its characters.
While Succession It follows a family that is already wealthy and struggles to maintain its relevance, Industry It centres on a group of twenty-somethings who are (mostly) not wealthy and desperate to prove themselves at the famous London investment bank Pierpoint & Co. Breaking away from the rampant nepotism of the Roy family, their workplace could charitably be described as meritocratic (it doesn't matter who you are as much as how much money you make), but it's also an obscenely toxic world devoid of morality.
Our gateway into the world of Pierpoint is Harper Stern (Myha'la Herrold, Bodies Bodies Bodies), a genius saleswoman with a dark secret (she never graduated from college). As a young black American woman, she stands out from the sea of mostly white British men on the sales floor. Perhaps that's why her New York boss, Eric Tao (Ken Leung, Lost), sees her as a potential protégé. Harper works alongside Yasmin (Marisa Abel), the daughter of a wealthy publishing family; Gus, a gay, black, conservative businessman; and Harry (Robert Spearing), the forced achiever from a working-class background.
In the third season, which will premiere on August 11, Game of Thrones' Kit Harrington joins the cast as Henry Muck, the wealthy CEO of Lumi, a beloved green energy startup on the verge of an IPO. (Not to be confused with real companies like Lumi Design Studiohe Lumi, the gadget to learn to play the pianoor the Packaging company Lumi no longer exists.) But, like a cross between Theranos, tech startups;cpos:5;pos:1;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas” class=”link “>Solyndra and the series of green tech startups that failed in the Obama eraLumi may not live up to the hype surrounding its green nature. Some banks would be wary of taking a troubled company public, but Pierpoint would not: its job is to make money from the IPO, not to judge Lumi's long-term viability.
That kind of amoral viewpoint is nothing new for Pierpoint or his minions in IndustryFrom the beginning, series creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay avoided turning the series into a sermon against the world of investment banking. Instead, all of its characters reflect the selfish philosophy initially set forth by From Wall Street Gordon Gekko: “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”
While some characters express their concerns about Lumi, Industry explores the most cynical (and arguably realistic) outcome: almost everyone finds a way to profit from the company's potential failure, except, of course, Lumi's customers and early investors.
“We wanted to write about an energy company that had real interests in the world and that seemed to be nipping at the heels of larger monopolistic competitors a little bit,” Down said in an interview on the Engadget podcast. “And we also wanted to write about the collapse of a company like that, a company that was really founded to do something really good, and what happens when that company goes bust and leaves a lot of destruction in its wake.”
Industry It began as a programme focusing on the interpersonal relationships between a small group of colleagues, their hedonistic nightlives and Pierpoint's erosion of their humanity, but its scope has now expanded to include the wider global economy, Britain's role in propping up failing businesses and rival trading companies.
“When we started, we were very inexperienced writers,” Kay said. “We deliberately wrote about a very closed, hermetic, very universal experience, which is that of people starting work at a certain time. (Now) the stakes are higher. We're more interested in how the workplace relates to the broader world, politics, newspapers, media, class.”
Beyond the intricacies of finances and the melodramatic romantic lives of Of the industry As for the characters, the real appeal of the show is “watching competent people doing their jobs well,” as Down puts it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand all the financial jargon the characters spout in the first season. Like a mix between Margin call and Michael Clayton, What are you doing? Industry What's truly compelling is watching smart people demonstrate their brilliance over and over again in a pressured environment.
For a show that looked like a Succession clone from scratch, Industry has become something radically different. Wealth and success are not something that is taken for granted for anyone on the show: it is something that has to be earned through blood, sweat and moral commitment.