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Louise Thomas
Editor
When Game of Thrones first aired, back in 2011, it did so with a parental advisory rating warning for “strong violence, gore, sex, sex references, nudity and language”. It was, in short, made for adults. But by the time that show ended, its audience seemed largely composed of teenage boys, hopped up on a heady cocktail of dragons, zombies and boobs. I wonder, then, what those same viewers would make of the sight of that show’s hero, Jon Snow (Kit Harington), receiving a very specific form of adult shower in the new season of the BBC’s banker drama Industry? In a world of swords and sandals, capes and cowls, this really is television for grown-ups (just don’t watch it with your parents).
Having successfully stripped the Square Mile of any remaining aspirational glamour, Industry returns this week for its third season. In the years since the show was commissioned, the tide of TV seems to have turned, leaving Industry an immutable, urine-soaked rock, battered by the retreating shoreline. The show has always been that rare thing: a drama that doesn’t compromise for the sake of its audiences. Its pilot episode kicked things off with a piece of misdirection, following a character who, by the end of the episode, would be dead. Arriving on BBC One with full HBO credentials, and Girls creator Lena Dunham directing the opener, it was a stark mission statement. This wasn’t going to be a simple black comedy lampooning the artificially high-stakes world of corporate finance – it was going to stare into the dark heart of humanity. What’s followed is three unflinching seasons: characters who make bad, selfish decisions and hurt one another, a professional milieu of almost grotesque vapidity, and an alienating landscape of arcane jargon and bullpen manoeuvring.
But would anyone take a punt on a project like this now? “I think Industry increasingly seems like a Black Swan event,” the show’s co-creator, Mickey Down, tells me. He’s referring to the famous allegory of risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb, about unpredictable outliers. “Even when we got the show commissioned, it felt like a Black Swan event, but now, the idea of us getting to make something like this on HBO or any major network is just totally for the birds.” In its place, according to Down’s co-creator, Konrad Kay, are “big tentpole things, with big tentpole names, that are going to attract an audience: that’s where we’ve got to now, because people are basically just scared.”
But the fear itself isn’t entirely new, and Industry was a real risk for HBO back in 2017, when it was announced. Down and Kay were TV novices, coming off the back of a few years spent as traders in the City. Handing them the keys to a primetime show (“The 9pm Sunday timeslot,” comes Kay’s appraisal, “still holds lots of sway in terms of cultural cachet”) was the sort of knife-edge decision that Pierpoint, the fictional investment bank in their show, pays its analysts top dollar to consider. And yet it happened, just a year after HBO had also ordered a pilot for Succession – a similarly insiderish, grown-up look at media oligopoly, and a show that, despite being its contemporary, Industry is often aptly touted as a successor to. But for all the garlands and rave reviews, Kay points to a problem. “A show like Succession is a cultural behemoth, but compared to something like Yellowstone, it’s a niche experience, a niche show.” And so, such adventurous commissioning decisions started to feel less swanlike, and more dodo-esque.
The rise of streaming has also seen a commensurate tendency for platforms to forgo fresh ideas and instead squeeze their existing Intellectual Property (IP) like they’re attacking the last remnants of a travel toothpaste. Disney has released numerous shows within the Star Wars universe (The Acolyte, The Mandalorian, Ahsoka, Andor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Book of Boba Fett etc), while its exploitation of the Marvel back catalogue is equally comprehensive (WandaVision, Agatha All Along, Secret Invasion, Hawkeye, Ms Marvel etc). Across the channels, some of the biggest shows of the past couple of years have been offshoots of major franchises – House of the Dragon or Rings of Power – or adaptations of video games, like Fallout, The Last of Us, Halo or Resident Evil. And this trend isn’t going to change any time soon: spin-offs from Suits, Dexter and Daredevil have all been announced for 2025, while there’ll be new instalments from the worlds of George RR Martin and Stephen King.
Over on HBO, for which Industry has been a critical darling if not an enormous ratings success (the second series averaged 1.4 million viewers per episode in the US, compared to the 7 million who would tune into Young Sheldon), September’s big new title, The Penguin, is part of the infinite Batman saga, and the start of a new commitment between HBO and DC Studios. “There’s way less risk being taken,” Down says of the TV landscape at large. “There’s way less appetite to develop new ideas.” The fact that HBO still adopts a linear model, broadcasting shows via weekly episodes in a specific timeslot, might account for its commitment to more grown-up programming. The demographics for more traditional modes of consumption skew older, while streaming platforms (HBO’s proprietary endeavour, Max, is not likely to launch in the UK until at least 2026) cater to younger viewers. “Why would you take a chance on something when it could fail? I think that’s really the attitude at the moment.”
It puts a lot of pressure on Industry, as a bastion of countercultural televisioneering. The third series takes the show into new territories, and Down and Kay agree that it is the apotheosis of the style they’ve been honing across the show’s first two outings. “Even though series two was good, I think it was a slight overcorrection,” says Down, “in that all the stuff that makes Industry interesting was pushed down a little bit in service of plot.” And so this latest chapter combines the uncompromising, authorial vision of the show’s “punky”, in Kay’s words, debut with something more accessible. “I feel like there’s a looseness to [season three],” Kay adds. It is a looseness that takes the show in diverse narrative and subtextual directions. In addition to seeing Jon Snow getting weed on, the drama explores the fallout from abusive familial relationships, the spiral of addiction, and, as ever, the cutthroat world of financial wheeler-dealering. “I think [the new season] makes a little bit more of a concession to intelligibility, fun, entertainment,” confesses Kay. “All of the stuff people actually do want TV to be.”
One of these concessions was the casting of Harington as the show’s first legitimate “star”. “He slipped into Industry with zero ego,” says Down. But Harington’s character – a fragile entrepreneur called Henry Muck – has little of the square-jawed, brooding intensity of his Thrones role. Muck is another in Industry’s long line of weak, self-destructive men. In this latest season we see Robert (Harry Lawtey) grappling with his place at Pierpoint and in the world, Eric (Ken Leung) spiralling out of control, and Rishi (Sagar Radia) becoming the focus of an episode that makes The Bear seem like a stress-free brain bath. This is a macho world dealing with the end of unchecked masculinity, and while it is often painful to watch, it is also starkly funny. “As Kit said himself,” explains Down, “in 10 years on Game of Thrones he didn’t tell one joke. He was playing the most earnest f***ing bloke on the planet!”
From earnestness, Harington turns now to something more cynical. Even if the world of high finance occasionally feels like watching droids on a spaceship, most of Industry is set on something recognisable as planet Earth. Our fears, our emotions, our failings; ambition, jealousy, greed. With its third season, Industry has cemented its place in the sweep of TV drama, as something maturely terrestrial that avoids the temptation to treat its viewers like children.
‘Industry’ season three is out now on BBC iPlayer
