On the surface of it, the appeal of Industry (BBC One) is a puzzle. At its best, the banking-and-wanking saga is as stressful as drinking 10 double espressos in a row then having to speak in public, naked, with no time to prepare. I barely understand the dialogue, particularly when it comes to the financial side. Any talk of trades, heavy with numbers and acronyms, is baffling. It makes the most technical of medical dramas sound like a Peppa Pig book. And it is stuffed, bloated even, with unpleasant characters doing terrible things to one another and the world.
That didn’t stop Succession, however, and Industry ploughs a similar furrow, churning up gruesomely gripping backstabbing and betrayals at lightning speed. It returns for a second run having pulled off a masterly season one finale, in which Harper (a still-brilliant Myha’la Herrold) managed to blow up the fragile bonds she made as a graduate. After an act of spectacularly self-serving sabotage, she was left with only two allies at Pierpoint investment bank: her manipulative ex-boss, Eric, and the overall big boss, Adler.
We rejoin Pierpoint a year into the Covid pandemic. Almost everyone is back at the office, apart from Harper, who has been holed up in a hotel room for the best part of 12 months, working alone with her multiple computer monitors, reluctant to return to the shop floor. A quick recap, to explain why: she betrayed the female managers who were trying to advance her career and change the toxic, macho workplace culture at the bank, thus sinking her mentors’ careers in the process. This has left her friendless, and, as we see in the opening episode, more vulnerable than you might think for someone who is clearly very good at her job. I don’t really understand what that job is, but judging by the case Robert made for his own career at the end of the last season, it involves taking clients out, getting them hammered and doing whatever they want in order to get them to do whatever you want. That, and watching speeches about rate variations and the value of the dollar.
The first episode does a bit of Industry-by-numbers, with an early montage of sex, meetings, powder-snorting and … swimming, actually, as Harper is no longer working hard and playing harder. In her hotel, she meets a billionaire, Jesse Bloom (Transparent’s Jay Duplass), who called the pandemic early and made a fortune. It isn’t long before Harper sees the potential in making friends with such a wealthy new arrival to London, though only a fool would think that Bloom will make it easy for her.
This isn’t just about the money. Robert (Harry Lawtey), who was hired despite having a cocaine-induced nosebleed during his interview, and only really being good at the client-relations side of things, is under pressure to bring in more clients, and pairing him up with the vile Nicole (Sarah Parish) is a smart move. It shifts the dial from sex to class, and the two of them are fantastic together on screen. Heartbreakingly, the worst best friends, or best worst friends, on television, Yasmin and Harper, remain enemies, which means Harper is missing out on Yas’s extravagant single phase. “There are radiators and there are drains,” Yas (Marisa Abela) tells Harper. “And you are a drain.” It’s an improvement on the C-word, at least, so I can only hope this means that their relationship is thawing.
That, I think, is the key to solving the mystery of Industry’s appeal. Somehow, no matter how terrible they are, I am rooting for Robert, Yas and Harper to succeed – or not even to succeed, but to somehow get out of there alive. Perhaps there is some catharsis, too, in watching such a nihilistic show, which burns through each episode in a rush of self-destruction and ego.
Industry keeps two cogs of tension whirring. There is a smaller one, chugging away during each episode, in which the little dramas are turned over quickly. Here, it’s Harper trying to ingratiate herself back into an amoral, ruthless world, despite being too amoral and ruthless even for the people who inhabit it. Then there is the bigger one, which moves slowly, pulling everything tighter and tighter: working from home shone a spotlight on London’s office culture and its questionable productivity, and with the added pressure of Brexit, there is every chance that Adler may restructure Pierpoint, at the cost of the UK branch.
There is always a sense that a reckoning is coming. The question is, from where? This opening episode sets a strong precedent, but the whole of the second series is on iPlayer, and the show only gets better as everyone’s behaviour, deliciously, gets worse and worse.
Industry season two is on BBC One in the UK, HBO Max in the US and Binge in Australia
