A maxim: when the British get old, they become pathetic; when Americans get old, they go psycho.
Fitting then that the fourth season of Industry, a British show with a thrashing American heart, blends the pathetic and the feral in ways that depart from the bildungsroman—to use an Eton and Balliol approved word—of the first three seasons.
This season’s betrayals operate at a higher speed. Tender co-founder Whitney Halberstram’s (Max Minghella)—this season’s new central character and villain—betrays Jonah (Kal Penn) in the premiere, “PayPal of Bukkake,” at a chickenshit velocity that makes Eric Tao’s betrayal of Adler at the end of season three seem positively glacial. From gaslighting an old colleague with brain cancer on the grand corporate stage to ducking eye contact like a punk as you give the boot to your co-founder for the sins of porn-y banter and exhaling the vapors of martinis “cold as space,” the treacheries in season four feel degraded and pettier.
Character churn is up too. In place of Rob’s gradual processing and final acceptance of his fraught relationship with his mother last season—aided by a just-so dose of hallucinogens—we have Henry Muck (Kit Harington) speedrunning, in a single episode, through intravenous drug use, a nepo-baby meltdown at his own fancy-dress birthday party, going on the lash with his father’s ghost, and railing starved-for-love Yasmin at daybreak.
The end of season 3 presented Otto Mostyn as the ne plus ultra of Industry overlords, a sinister, fish-gutting, King-Lear-quoting aristocratic who sees himself and Harper as bandits both. In season 4? Brief little diva-off with Harper while wearing an ermine robe, bragging about how he can be ableist again, before giving us a sassy turn and dematerializing into royal shadows. When we see him again? Getting dreary head on an overstuffed couch and jangling a tin of mints during what is his likely two-month refractory period. I knew Stringer Bell. He was a friend of mine. And Otto, you are no Stringer Bell.
The homages are more obvious this time around too. Jim Dycker (Charlie Heaton)’s desperate, coked-out, and deeply sad monologue in "1000 Yoots, 1 Marilyn" is essentially a Zillenial xerox of Tom Wilkinson’s opening monologue in Michael Clayton; showrunners Mickey Down and Konrad Kay have said that the work of Tony Gilroy is an angel that floats above this season. And how are our final moments with Rishi (Sagar Radia) in that same episode anything other than an Uncut Gems or Good Time crash ending for a character whose previous bottom was his wife being murdered in front of him? Muck’s suicide attempt in a vintage Jaguar in “The Commander and the Grey Lady” was nearly identical to Lane Pryce’s first failed attempt on Mad Men. Immature artists borrow, mature artists steal, a very fancy American poet who cosplayed as British once wrote.
That’s not to say that this season isn’t a success. The show remains mesmerizing, and deeply of-the-moment in its speed and its ruthlessness and its flashes of dark glee. Threesomes in rooms where the paintings of Adolf Hitler look down on the participants. Whitney slowly tipping over a chair in his office then barking for Hayley (Kiernan Shipka) to come fix it. The absurdity, in “Eyes Without a Face,” of the security guards in the empty building in Accra, forever picking up and dropping the phone into its receiver.
Kit Harington’s performance as Muck is remarkable: I assumed after seeing him only in Game of Thrones and a wretched video game adaptation sequel (Silent Hill: Revelation) that his range was sad boy plus, a damp dude fated to play opposite the pyrotechnic types. I was wrong. I don’t want to overvalue the role that Muck’s biographical overlaps with Harington’s own life details (historic families; in recovery for alcohol misuse; open about their mental health struggles) might play in Harington absolutely magnetizing the season, but I do get a whiff of Eminem-in-8-Mile, of Lady Gaga-in-A-Star-Is-Born. That’s a compliment. Tensions of life and of art are pinging like tuning fork tines in Harington’s work here, and when Muck begins to cycle between jolts of confidence and maudlin loafing, few other performances on TV can match it.
Last night’s “Dear Henry” should probably be Harington’s Emmy submission. To review: Whitney gazes at Henry’s naked body in the shower. Yasmin arrives on the scene. She rips Whitney. Then she and Henry lob bombs at each other (“I can’t carve you a place in the world”). At the business dinner that follows, Harington delivers exquisite half-sad, half-bemused eye acting and reactions straight from the David Niven school of British leading men.
Henry has no sense of self because his identity was sculpted by forces beyond him. He has the UK class system to keep him warm. He’s been pulled into a marriage with a beautiful, savvy, charismatic woman—Lord Norton designed it—and given another chance at achievement after public shame and failure. But he can only find escape in the flash from wine at dinner to being in Whitney’s arms, flush with drugs. Then he’s redeemed in the glory hole, hearing “everyone wants you” and literally being held.
He’s a new man at dawn. He’s “cracking on,” sitting with the moment, at peace—or at least a good narcotic simulation of peace—and as close to himself as he’ll ever be able to get. He’s finally seeing through Whitney’s MBA word-salad of the self. Henry doesn’t call him a loser or a freak. Sir Henry sticks him with the weapon of his tribe: “I’ve got plenty of middle-class friends.”
I give this season of Industry the most credit for its dark velocity: it’s the first show I’ve seen that drags Zillennials and Zoomers into middle age. These characters’ post-grad days of Season 1 belong to a different decade of life. The Pierpoint trading floor was their high school homeroom. Time and capital events and bad bets have turned that to dust. Rob and Gus and Venetia and Anraj are gone, and with them, swaths of Yasmin’s and Harper’s memories. Isn’t that how it works with people from your twenties?
The new world of Season 4 has teeth the old one did not. Yasmin’s big manipulative threesome in “Habseligkeiten” shades her as a sexual puppet master; in the aftermath an episode later, Hayley only needs fifteen seconds in the elevator to reveal herself as the truly dark freek-a-leek. There are now women younger than Yasmin who can move more relentlessly across the gameboards of seduction, power, and silence. Marisa Abela’s costuming this season—the high necklines, the faux-power shoulder pads and blazers—have vaulted her over and past the girlboss era. She’s Lady Muck. Yasmin’s chosen life in listed buildings has aged her soul like living on one of Saturn’s moons where years pass faster than days.
Sweetpea (Miriam Petche) and Kwabena (Toheeb Jimoh) are aging in real time too. “Eyes Without a Face” could have been a backdoor pilot for Industry: The New Class. Sweetpea needling Kwabena for being a lot closer to Accra’s elite networks than he’s comfortable admitting. Sweetpea pounding the pavement, getting to the root of Tender’s deceptions. All good things flush with the courage of youth. But then, as happens on Industry, dues must be paid by sexualized violence against a female character. Sweetpea’s assault in the bathroom ends with her looking at herself in the cracked mirror, her broken nose (a gender-inverted, sexualized echo of Jack Nicholson’s mangled nose in Chinatown) both a punishment for digging into a conspiracy and a perverted badge of survival.
Harper’s aging has brought her to her own fund, a commercial enterprise as jaded and spiky as her inner topography. Her deepest values have become the ghost inside her Bloomberg Terminal. Isn’t that success? There’s a reason that luxury hotel suites full of displays and screens have been her Batcave since the pilot.
One potential translation of “SternTao” would be “hard way.” Eric Tao (Ken Leung) cannot let himself age, so of course he’s in the disturbingly young sex worker’s room minutes after being half-decent to his wife and daughter. Also not surprisingly: one of Eric’s daughters has become exactly the kind of mediocre “little monster” that Harper dunked on to get Eric to hire her in the pilot. When Harper and Eric make their confessions to each other in “Eyes Without a Face,” it’s not real intimacy. They are swapping data points and pep talks. Or at least that’s all Eric is capable of.
Myha’la has done something truly remarkable in her work as Harper this season. Harper has always been the core of Industry. But she spins slower this year, the pitiless sun around which these jittery planets of men like Eric and Whitney orbit. She’s still momentarily anxious around inherited wealth—“dumb money” social settings—but her ability to accelerate out of that nervousness into her furnace of internal motivation marks her maturity. Watch her eyes flicker from curiosity to disdain in the season premier when Whitney tells his tale about how the high-volume business of funerals inducted him into capitalism.
24-year-old analysts emerging from J.P. Morgan’s new bronze-looking monolith in Midtown or from one of Canary Wharf’s innumerable towers are not doomed. Many 37-year-olds straining to make MD are. They’ve made burnt offerings out of their relationships and collagen and adrenal glands. ‘Ambition’ is a word said with an almost sexual purr by the young, and said with caution by those at 40. And urgency and desperation and ambition are as close together as back teeth.
Vapors of anxiety float behind the camera, on the screen, in the soundtrack and across each character in each episode of Industry. Mickey Down and Konrad Kay are deeply talented and educated and charismatic and have made an excellent TV show whose evolution is an exemplar that artists need time. Season 1 was YA. Season 2 was diffuse but better. Season 3 was excellent. Season 4 is surprising, filled with nasty psychological propellants, and with wonderful dumb horny beats borrowed from ‘90s erotic thrillers like Disclosure and Bad Influence.
A show with the intensity of Industry can’t go on forever. You wonder if they are closer to the end than to the beginning. The entertainment world shudders through more contraction and homogenization, as will all media for the foreseeable future. The once sturdy sorting mechanism that turned George Clooney and Olivia Colman from TV stars into movie stars is now creaky at best. And are there even any movie stars left beyond Denzel? For talent behind the camera, career trajectories have never been more precarious. Resumes like Michael Schur’s or Vince Gilligan’s are on the endangered species list. Kay and Down have to know this. One year’s processional of profiles and photo shoots can become silence faster than ever. Is there, right now, a would-be writer about to quit their job at Jane Street to make a show about the Galleon Group that underserved Desi audiences will reward with mighty viewership numbers? Will it be for short form vertical video? Will Palantir co-produce? This isn’t concern trolling. This is market watching.
So, to cite a show that Industry borrows from, another penetrating piece of pop art that made glorious hay from its characters’ swoons between delusion and self-knowledge: Everyone on Industry is living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one.