In "Industry," there's no love on the trading floor

A review.

Near the end of the second season of Industry, a high-finance addition to HBO’s roster of detestable characters you can’t help but watch, the show gets eerily close to breaking the fourth wall. Eric Tao (Ken Leung), a former titan of the trading floor who has been relegated to a corner office and is looking to jump ship, looks just inches away from the camera and muses: “Isn't it lucky that no one is ever satisfied?” Yes, it’s lucky, because it is precisely the insatiable emptiness of Industry’s characters that makes for great TV.

Created by first-time showrunners Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, who met at Oxford and did their time at London investment banks, Industry is an acutely cynical show about people eternally chasing their next high—professional, drug-induced, sexual, whatever they can get. The power plays range from subtle sleights of hand to brutal backstabbings, heightened by ever-ringing phones and a million screens all running Bloomberg Terminal. It’s an intense watch full of impenetrable jargon, but when the long-anticipated “execute” that signals a done deal pierces through, it brings a twisted sense of gratification. Briefly.

This season, a group of young investment bankers return to the trading floor of prestigious London bank Pierpoint & Co. For Harper (Myha'la Herrold), armed with a fake diploma from SUNY Binghamton in a sea of Oxbridge grads, the pandemic was a lucky respite from a workplace full of people she’s wronged. She’s beckoned back into the office by Eric, the Don Draper to her Peggy Olson, to whom she’s bonded by shared secrets, codependency and the slightest hint of affection.

On top of that, Pierpoint HQ is eyeing a merger of the London and New York desks, putting careers at risk. “How do we protect ourselves?” Harper asks. “Production,” a higher-up says. Willing to double-cross Eric, Harper sets her sights on courting Jesse Bloom (Jay Duplass), an infamous hedge fund manager who can move the market with the wave of his hand.

The only banker attempting redemption is Robert (Harry Lawtey), who is sober after years of compensating for his working-class accent and off-the-rack suit with drugs and alcohol. Too bad his most valuable client loves to feed him drinks and get extremely handsy. Meanwhile, Yasmin (Marisa Abela), the polyglot daughter of a billionaire who’s had no good days on the floor, finds herself in the cushier upstairs of private wealth management, which forces her to face the abuse she’s put up with and perpetuated.

So, everyone is jumping through hoops and dancing with clients’ egos to prove their worth, except for Gus (David Jonsson), the Oxford-educated son of a diplomat who left Pierpoint at the end of the last season and bleached his buzzcut to hammer it home. He tries his hand at politics (the Conservative Party, of course) and tutoring (getting Jesse Bloom’s son into Oxford), making him an insider whose best friends are traders. What could possibly go wrong?

At its best, Industry is just as thrilling as the exorbitant trades its bankers pull off and the designer drugs that help them get there. Its whip-smart and occasionally poetic dialogue elucidates the fast-paced world of high finance and makes it engrossing. Sleek direction by Birgitte Stærmose, Isabella Eklöf, and Caleb Femi keep the show in constant motion, while Nathan Micay’s electronic, synth-filled score elevates its coolness. The central characters are a compelling, unpredictable band of outsiders, played to perfection especially by Herrold and Leung. When the lens is turned onto their personal lives, however, many threads remain loose and some scenes have no repercussions in sight. If there’s one thing to learn from this season, though, it’s that the past always comes back when the time is right.

While the first season set up Pierpoint’s toxic environment and the toll it takes on employees, the second interrogates the cycles of abuse the industry runs on and questions whether an alternative is possible. Industry’s depiction of race, class and identity in the workplace is some of the finest in TV right now, because of its simultaneous subtlety and centrality to the characters’ decisions and ambitions. Where the characters of its tonal cousin Succession created the system, those of Industry maneuver the lower rungs of it. Industry makes it clear that banking is a meritocracy with many caveats, where change is often only a talking point.

Every revenue-generating institution runs on injustice. “Maybe ask yourself how someone with such average grades, from such an average university, ended up in Pierpoint on a desk you didn't apply to,” Yasmin’s tycoon dad barks at her. Eric lists the racial slurs his former mentor would call him, “all laced with affection, of course.” Labor in a time of neoliberalism is, by definition, a game of oversight. What makes the drama of Industry so striking is watching the characters find out for themselves just how much they’ll turn a blind eye to.

There is no love on the trading floor. Every action a transaction, every conversation an affectation, Industry’s characters feed off of each other with no remorse. They’ll sell each other out—it’s just a matter of who goes first—but bridges are only ever burnt until they need each other again. The question is, then, who will get out alive and who will be corrupted absolutely? There are no safe bets, but the journey to the end will sure be riveting.