Graduates from all walks of life compete for a coveted position at Pierpoint, a top investment bank in London.
The graduates include Harper Stern (Myha’le), a black upstate New York native who uproots her life in pursuit of success, despite having lied about the university she attended.
Other graduates include Harold (Hari) Dhar (Nabhan Rizwan), a state-school graduate and child of Hindi-speaking immigrants, Augustus “Gus” Sackey(David Johnsson), a gay black British graduate from Eton and Oxford, Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey) is a white, working-class Oxford graduate who is eager to please, and Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela), a privileged, well-connected child of Lebanese parents with an underachieving, drug addled boyfriend.
There are more than just dinner parties and vicious spats on the set of the black-hearted INDUSTRY. Nasty people doing jobs you don’t understand; that’s the core business of the show, that’s utterly compelling, a hit show about cut-throat young people competing for success in the world of fintech.
Yasmin is now up to her swan-like neck in Britain’s right-wing political fringe. Harper is running a fund elsewhere and tangling with a new, nascent bank called Tender, headed up by Machiavellian Whitney Halberstram(Max Minghella).
INDUSTRY is not for everyone. Writers and producers, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay’s drama about young city bankers is zeitgeisty, iconoclastic and slightly inaccessible. The BBC-HBO co-production has morphed from an intriguingly cool chronicle of trading floor hierarchies and after-hour hedonism (read– a lot of masturbation) into a kaleidoscopic and mercilessly entertaining study of money and status and power in the UK.
Along the way, the show has accrued huge acclaim and a hard core following, with its jaw-dropping scandalous, sex-and-drugs strewn action and unusually complex subject matter. The show gives its excellent cast ample opportunity to prove themselves on screen.
At the heart of INDUSTRY is Yasmin and Harper’s twisted, yet bizarrely relatable love story. The pair need each other in a really bastardised way, a way that is really reflective of many female friendships. There is something Shakespeare like about their dynamic of mutual envy. Harper resents Yasmin’s wealth, her status, her choice to use her femininity as a weapon. Yasmin, meanwhile, covets Harper’s gravitas and capacity to mingle with key people, and listens to her when she is speaking in a professional setting. Its also a show that’s incredibly effective at dramatising the insidiousness of patriarchy. The series is also darkly funny, although it’s a far stretch from satire.
INDUSTRY’s most pervasive motto is what happens when the transactional nature of finance bleeds into everything else, and lessens your own humanity, our ability to be vulnerable and to empathise,
For me, the interesting character was Rishi, degenerate gambler, drug addict and philanderer, a character that melds masculinity with working in the world of investment banking, all of which window dresses for what is going on inside him.
Binge worthy.
