Industry has always been a show with a lot of "too online" energy. A cocaine tornado of culturally in-vogue reference points, from Euphoria to Safdie brothers' movies to Tik Tok vids about finance bros. So it shouldn't be too surprising that, while the internet is conspiracymaxxing about Jeffrey Epstein and all his enablers and backers, the series' fourth season introduces a shadowy figure bent on financial domination, sexual manipulation, and extortion. After all, it was no accident that Epstein's own origins trace back to the world of Wall Street.
That said, I am worried that the show's maximalist ADHD mandate has finally caught up to it. It's hard to say a show that delights in jumping sharks has jumped the shark exactly, but it does seem like Industry may have bitten off more than it can chew, leading to an uneven season where the highs are kind of dulled for feeling rehashed and the lows are a lot harder to overlook.
The decision to move on from Pierpoint wasn't an altogether bad one, though the boiler-room intensity of having all the characters in the same room, not knowing whether they might kill each other or fuck (or both), was key to the excitement of the previous seasons. Following the characters out in the world has expanded the show's scope, but the result hasn't really been any more fulfilling and certainly isn't any more coherent. To return to the Epstein angle, Max Minghella is good at playing Whitney Halberstram, the supervillain tech finance bro, but the combination of his James Bond nemesis energy mixed with Patrick Bateman makes it feel as if the writers arrived at his character after playing a game of evil CEO bingo. Despite those flaws, I did sort of like him as the Epstein-like puppet master blackmailing everyone around him. But the reveal that, it turns out, Halberstram is just a patsy of even more shadowy forces borders on QAnon ridiculousness and boring writing.
The creators of this show clearly enjoy writing themselves into corners and then seeing what happens, which is fine on a show like Breaking Bad that tries to adhere to some form of realism, even if a bit stretched. Here, in this Looney Tunes-on-ecstasy nightmare world, it just creates more and more hijinks and explosive turns that eventually start to lose their impact. No one has any real beliefs or points of view, which I guess is realistic but still makes it impossible to really understand why anyone does what they do. I don't know why Yasmine is still with Henry except for his money. I don't know why Eric didn't kill himself despite talking like someone who was about to do just that. I can't tell whether Harper is supposed to be driven most by vengeance, morality, or greed, in part because sometimes it seems like it's all three at the same time. Rishi jumps out of a window but lives? And is arrested? And we just never deal with that storyline again?
Industry hasn't just become bad all of a sudden, and because there's so much happening, it can't help but still hit a few targets now and then. But overall things have gotten way too unwieldy—a dog chasing its own tail, while on ketamine. The show's growing popularity makes me wonder if they plan to keep doing more of it, despite the fact that, narratively speaking, it would probably be best to end things with Sunday's upcoming season finale. How much longer can they really keep this up? Or, like the world it dramatizes, are we destined to watch it grow more insane and unregulated as the returns dry up?
