Industry airs Sunday nights on HBO and streams on HBO Max.
Those of us who got in on the ground floor with Industry have been saying this from the very beginning: You gotta watch Industry. As its audience has grown from its early days being criminally underwatched—a genuine travesty for prestige television—so too has the HBO series evolved and matured. The drama, created by former bankers Mickey Downs and Konrad Kay, has developed into a surefooted, full-throttled, and wincingly sex- and drug-fueled account of power brokering that has seeped out from the trading floors of financial firms to fintech startup-land, the media, and government with increasing scope and ambition. Even though the canvas of Season 4 is considerably wider, the storytelling is at its most incisive and bloat-free, and the score is reliably as gloriously ’80s synth-poppy as ever. Really, if you aren’t watching Industry by now, I’m genuinely imploring you: You gotta watch Industry.
A Hard Reset That Pays Dividends
After three seasons of following a freshman class at the investment banking firm Pierpoint and their often antagonistic seniors navigating cutthroat corporate culture, Season 4 finds most everyone has moved on in fascinating ways, relegating the company that was sold off to an Egyptian sovereign fund at the end of Season 3 to little more than a footnote. This deliberate shedding of the past works brilliantly. Further unburdening itself from the Pierpoint walls works especially well as Industry‘s characters find themselves in new stages of their lives and careers that could only have happened had they left that toxic environment behind. In this hard reset, they’ve graduated into new positions of power and influence but must deal with the complex fallout from the choices they had made while they worked there. The consequences of their actions finally catch up with them in ways both devastating and fascinating.
With Robert Spearing escaping to find a new life courting money for a medicinal mushroom startup in Silicon Valley—which sadly means no Harry Lawtey this season, though his absence is handled well—Harper Stern (Myha’la) and Yasmin Hanani (Marisa Abela) now take well-deserved center stage as the show’s dual protagonists.
Money and power beget nothing but access to money and power. Staving off the fear of losing all that is far more crucial than achieving even a sliver of true happiness.
Harper and Yasmin Ascend
At the season’s outset, Harper finally gets to run a fund—the position she’s been clawing toward since day one. She’s evolved from a scrappy floor analyst with bold ideas that others largely balked at (until they ended up raking in serious cash) to someone who’s now genuinely known for making daring gambles with her signature shorts that have made her reputation. She’s dressing for the part too, with devastatingly well-tailored power suits and bespoke silver earring stacks that signal she’s arrived. And yet after being tapped by the old moneyed benefactor Otto Mostyn (Roger Barclay), she still experiences significant friction between wanting to execute her bold vision and Mostyn’s racist intentions to flaunt her as the progressive face of the firm while changing absolutely nothing substantive.
It’s not long until she finds unexpected common ground with her old boss, Eric Tao (the consistently fantastic Ken Leung), who’s been living aimlessly in a semi-forced retirement, his family life in complete shambles. Their reunion and evolving partnership provides some of the season’s most compelling material.
Yasmin has married Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington) primarily to pull her out of the looming embezzlement and assault charges left behind by her dead father—a strategic move that’s as emotionally costly as it is legally necessary. She’s now protected from that shame publicly within the arms of British tabloid royalty and doing her absolute utmost hosting and managing seating charts of elite networking events with precision and grace. But her marriage is badly flailing, with Yasmin putting in an astronomical amount of emotional work constantly gassing up an unappreciative Henry to pull him out of another dark hole of depression. It’s exhausting just to watch.
Performances With Fresh Depth
The two frenemies’ narrative courses largely run parallel throughout the season, which means their shared screen time is more limited than in past seasons but absolutely crackles with tension and history whenever they do intersect, weighted by all the tribulations—and it’s truly a lot—they’ve each swallowed this season. Both Myha’la and Abela turn in performances with fresh depth and complexity for their already well-established characters.
Harper is still the icy Harper we know, freshly 30 and casually shredding a birthday card from her mother without a second thought, but she’s no longer the complete lone wolf she once was. As a people manager and business partner, she shows seemingly genuine interest in the wellbeing and development of those around her, letting in a new softness and vulnerability—as long as they’re actively helping her succeed, of course. But ultimately she still can’t give up the compulsion to say the most devastatingly cruel thing as the last word in any confrontation. Some things never change.
Yasmin’s desperate attempts to carve out a real sphere of influence for herself flip constantly between public confidence and crowd-working extroversion to private insecurity that her entire life is being precariously held together by sticks and glue. It’s a masterclass in showing the gap between public persona and private reality. Harrington gives yet another genuinely great performance as the rich failson who has literally everything material he could want but can’t escape the crushing curse of existential dread that money can’t fix. Many of the absolute best scenes of the season are between Harrington and Abela brutally duking out their marital strife like coked-up renditions of That One Scene from Anatomy of a Fall. The comparison is apt and the performances are electric.
Overall, Industry is crystal clear in its thesis: Money and power beget nothing but access to more money and power. Staving off the paralyzing fear of losing all that is far more crucial than achieving even a sliver of true happiness or fulfillment because even if the characters did somehow find that happiness, they would inevitably find another way to self-destruct. It’s a bleak worldview delivered with unflinching honesty.
New Faces, Expanded World
Though, again, there’s no Lawtey this season (or Sarah Goldberg, sadly, since Harper jumped ship from Leviathan Alpha), the old guard, excellent new additions, and expanded narrative footprints more than make up for the losses. Rishi Ramdani (Sagar Radia), who blew up a cushy privileged life through crippling gambling debts and is now desperately scrounging at rock bottom, becomes that haunting face of self-obliteration that the show does so well.
Kiernan Shipka doesn’t hold back whatsoever as Haley Clay, opening the season premiere in a club and getting far too intimate with Charlie Heaton’s finance blogger Jim Dycker in a scene that immediately establishes her character. Shipka plays it with exactly the cutthroat confidence Industry requires from its players. Miriam Petche’s Sweetpea Golightly—forever an all-time great TV character name—gets considerably more space to develop this season, highlighting yet another woman who Pierpoint mistreated and dismissed as an idiot punchline can actually, of course, very capably hold her own when given the opportunity.
My personal favorite new cast member is probably Ted Lasso‘s Toheeb Jimoh as Kwabena Bannerman, the joke-cracking Normal Guy proxy the show desperately needs in a sea of borderline sociopaths and narcissists. Jimoh’s grounded presence is especially needed to counterbalance a new major player in the mix: Max Minghella’s Whitney Halberstam.
Max Minghella’s Sinister Turn
Halberstam is the CFO of the fintech startup Tender that’s attempting an ambitious rebrand into a vague one-stop banking app promising to revolutionize everything. He delivers prosaically cringe lines that sound like bad malapropisms from mediocre movies with such practiced poise and arrogance that immediately makes him deeply suspicious, especially as a deliberate counterpoint to Kal Penn’s comparatively straight-shooting Tender CEO Jonah Atterbury. It doesn’t take long to figure out that’s exactly the point—”Why does everything from your life sound like a bad novel?” Henry asks in a later episode, having been sucked into his orbit via Yasmin and the trigger of the Online Safety Bill—and it begets something far more chillingly sinister about his true motives. Minghella is having a blast playing this character and it shows.
Evil Over Stupidity
If shows like Succession and Veep are primarily about how stupid and incompetent rooms of power can be, Industry is fundamentally about the evils and moral bankruptcy within these same spaces. That’s not to say that Industry isn’t often still laugh-out-loud funny—it absolutely is. It’s just that the approach is vastly different. Kay, Downs, and the writing team let their characters be unabashedly awful people without apology or redemption arcs. In contrast, the viewers, as it often is in reality, are the ones left reeling from their beliefs and actions, left holding the bag of consequences.
Industry is admittedly not a show for everyone. It’s overwhelmingly cynical and sometimes genuinely difficult to watch, not just because of the ethical void at its center but because almost no one seems capable of making a decision that positively benefits them, or society, beyond padding their own bank accounts. If there’s anything that occasionally detracts from the show’s effectiveness it’s that it sometimes can’t afford to be subtle about its themes. But the relentless stress of it all, compounded by dense and fast-moving dialogue that rewards close attention, is also precisely what makes it so compulsively compelling.
Masterful Use of Eight Episodes
In the era of TV seasons with frustratingly single-digit episode counts, Industry has used up every scrap of its eight episodes with incredible finesse and purpose. Several episodes still playfully experiment with form and classic genre tropes: There’s a ghost story, the most stressful “Dear John” letter scene you’ll ever witness, a wild international goose chase hunting down the disturbing truth behind Tender’s operations. And then there are the wild juxtapositions that only this show would dare, like the unforgettable cut to Yasmin slurping (and burping) down an oyster right as she’s going down on another woman. It’s shocking, hilarious, and perfectly Industry.
Season 4 is both bigger—with more incisive insight into the interconnected web of politics and business, and journalism—and somehow even tighter and more focused at the same time. Of course, the show is still laden with plenty of financial jargon and terminology, but by and large what’s at stake at the emotional core of the story is far more intelligible for laypeople and finance dummies like me. The human drama is always foregrounded.
Even with HBO’s exciting 2026 slate of solid series—even right now, we’ve got Season 2 of The Pitt and the Game of Thrones prequel spin-off A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms—Season 4 positions Industry to legitimately jockey for the top of the pile as HBO’s best current drama. It’s that good.
Why You Should Be Watching
For fans who’ve been with Industry since the beginning, Season 4 represents everything we’ve been waiting for—the show firing on all cylinders with complete confidence in its voice and vision. For those who’ve been hearing the buzz but haven’t jumped in yet, there’s genuinely never been a better time. While starting from Season 1 would obviously provide maximum context, the hard reset nature of Season 4 actually makes it somewhat accessible to newcomers willing to do a bit of catch-up.
The show’s willingness to let its characters be genuinely terrible people without asking for our sympathy is refreshing in an era where antiheroes are often softened or redeemed. Industry understands that we can be fascinated by characters we’d never want to know in real life, that we can be compelled by their struggles without needing to root for their success. It’s a mature approach to storytelling that respects its audience’s intelligence.
The technical aspects remain impeccable as well. The cinematography captures both the sterile glass-and-steel environments of power and the grimy chaos of self-destruction. The editing is razor-sharp, often cutting at precisely the moment of maximum discomfort. And that synth-pop score continues to be one of the best soundtracks on television, evoking both the excess of ’80s Wall Street and the hollowness underneath.
The Verdict
Industry‘s potent blend of contemporary finance drama and its characters’ doomed attempts at self-actualization is running on absolute maximum power in Season 4. By deliberately putting Pierpoint in the rearview mirror, the series has graduated to a bigger, more dangerous playing field where the consequences are exponentially more dire and the stakes genuinely matter beyond just career advancement.
This is peak prestige television—smart, uncompromising, beautifully crafted, and utterly addictive. Myha’la and Abela deliver career-best performances that deserve awards recognition. The supporting cast is uniformly excellent. The writing is sharp enough to cut. And the whole package comes together as one of the most exciting, vital shows currently on television.
If you value intelligent storytelling, complex characters, and television that treats you like an adult capable of handling moral ambiguity and uncomfortable truths, you need to be watching Industry. Season 4 is a masterclass in how to evolve a series while maintaining everything that made it special in the first place.
Seriously. You gotta watch Industry.
9.5/10 Stars
Check out Industry Sunday nights on HBO and streams on HBO Max.
