‘Industry’ Season 3 Premiere Recap: Sex & Drugs & IPOs

The Sopranos, but more bitingly cynical. Euphoria, but with more and better sex and drugs. Mr. Robot, but there’s no hackers. Mad Men, but you flash forward six decades to discover basically nothing has changed. Succession, but with characters who sound like humans instead of lab rats in some kind of inventive-swearing experiment. Industry, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay’s remarkable workplace drama set in the atavistic world of London finance, feels like many shows at once; somehow, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. 

Returning for its third season, the show once again skips forward in time, dropping us into the lives of the characters in medias res. (Whether the similarity is deliberate or not, this, like everything the show has in common with the thematically similar Mad Men, feels both loving and earned by dint of the show’s superlative quality.) Harper (Myha’la), previously our main woman, is all but a bit player in the events of the premiere, having been fired for from the storied investment bank Pierpoint & Co by her mentor, Eric (Ken Leung), in the Season 2 finale. Technically the excuse was that she faked her college transcript and never actually graduated, but the real reason was her general fucked-uppedness.

But Harper pops up with both a new haircut and a new job in the finance industry, working (poorly) as the personal assistant of Anna (Elena Saurel), the CEO of a quote-unquote ethical investment firm, FutureDawn. Harper, whose emotionally abusive upbringing and extravagantly destructive sociopathy make Tony Soprano look well-adjusted, thinks the place’s mission is bullshit. As she tells Petra (Sarah Goldberg), the firm’s restive star trader, “ESG is a fad, ethical investing is a fad…a utopian opiate for morons who [she does airquotes for this bit] ‘believe in a better world,’ whatever the fuck that means.”

Her buddies at Pierpoint are up to the eyeballs in the stuff, however. Eric’s entire department — which now includes almost the entire Pierpoint cast — is waiting with bated breath for a green-energy IPO massive enough to help Eric finally make partner. The company, given the pitch-perfect uplifting-nonsense name Lumi in nice rounded all-lowercase letters, is run by, get this, Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington). Dickensian by name, Dickensian by nature, Henry talks a good game, but he’s a petulant oaf who’s really in it for the money, not the mission. This repulsive toff is now the dark star around which the rest of the players revolve.

The largest planetoid circling him is Eric. The rock star of the trading floor is now separated from his wife; she left him, sending him on a three-day bender that ended when he came to recovering alcoholic Kenny (Conor MacNeill) for help. When Eric’s loathsome boss Adler (Trevor White) mandate a new policy of firing people more or less at random (“constant cuts are the state of our industry,” he says, speaking for literally all industries), Eric repays Kenny’s kindness by firing the man the morning of the IPO to show he can make tough choices.

He also spends the night before the big event partying with sales associate slash scandal-haunted heiress Yasmin (Marisa Abela) and her attorney, Denise Oldroyd (Fiona Button). Here’s where I say that Industry is an extremely hot show, like pornographically so, which I mean as a very sincere compliment. Thus Denise gets my vote for hottest line of the night: When she invites Eric to join them in the middle of a bad date, she explains to a baffled Yasmin, with pulse-quickening directness, that she’s interested in the freshly less-than-married man because “I love an old dog with new appetites.” Whoo-ee.

Watching Yasmin give into Eric and Denise’s peer pressure is grim for several reasons. One, there’s her self-assessment: After first saying she’s not that kind of person anymore, she recants with “I’m lying. This is what I’m good at.” Knowing her desire to be taken seriously as a person, this is like running up the white flag. Two, she’s already seen the lines between personal and professional blurred that evening, getting dragged out to Henry’s estate to meet his even more awful relatives and reassure him that the IPO will go well. Third, there’s the reason she’s been an Industry-style dry drunk: Her ghastly father, publishing magnate Charles Hanani (Adam Levy), embezzled a fortune from his employees’ pension fund and skedaddled, leaving her holding the bag and hounded by the paps. 

But there’s more, and it’s worse. For yet-undisclosed reasons, Yasmin wound up on her dad’s party boat on holiday, despite being very, very estranged from him by the end of Season 2. A misleading photo makes it look like she was living it up alongside him when in fact she was sober and deeply unhappy, a conditioned worsened when she walks in on her dad in flagrante in her own room. And unless I got something real wrong, a split-second flashback later in the episode indicates his sexual violation of his daughter did not stop there.

Yasmin and Harper live in a house owned by their mutual sometimes love interest and/or fuck buddy Robert (Harry Lawtey), who owns the place and shares it with his girlfriend and former underling (this is how they roll at Pierpoint) Venetia (Indy Lewis). But Robert is still secretly fucking Nicole (Sarah Parish), a client who shares his working-class background and triggers the fuck out of his mommy complex. When she dies in his arms overnight, he’s horribly traumatized and breaks down on the trading floor when he’s supposed to be riding herd on Sir Henry during the IPO that morning. Only a demented pep talk from Eric, who screams “I’M A MAN AND I’M RELENTLESS” into Robert’s face repeatedly until the younger man can shout it back convincingly, pulls him back from the cliff. 

And oh, a glamorous graduate called Sweetpea Golightly (Miriam Petche) is doing influencer shit on the trading floor. Sweetpea Golightly, Denise Oldroyd, Sir Henry Muck: They really went for it with the names this season. How any of the aforesaid persons (hey, if the show can reference Barry Lyndon, so can I) will fare after something — or someone? — cuts the power to the building the second the IPO is to launch remains to be seen. 

In an effort to be as unlike Harper as possible, I’m going to offer something in the interest of full disclosure: I did not watch Industry until I caught up for this season. I feel like a rube, a poltroon, a tomfool. Industry is one of the best dramas on television, launching with an all-timer of a pilot and maintaining a masterful grasp on both the intricacies of its financial-thriller aspects and the complexities of its extremely challenging characters ever since. If I were to list everything I loved about the show in general, or even about this episode in particular, I’d be staring at this computer screen all night; since I don’t have the kind of cocaine budget these guys do, I’ll have to pass.

But I can give you a smattering, just off the top of my head. I love how it hides its nature as a classic, New Golden Age–style antihero drama by making its protagonist a diminutive young woman starting at the bottom instead of an imposing mob boss or ad exec at the height of his powers. Maybe she’ll get there eventually, like Walter White did? I apologize for making all these comparisons to great TV shows of the past, but in Industry’s case, again, the comparisons are wholly earned. 

I love not just its frankness about sex, but its intelligence. Yes, it’s lurid and bracing to watch a woman walk in on her dad with a woman sitting on his face and his erect penis jutting into the air in full view of the camera. But think of how the show conveys Robert’s desperation for someone, anyone to make him believe he deserves love by first making him sub for Yasmin, then get embroiled in a sexual relationship with a woman he knows has assaulted two of his girlfriends because of how hard the age gap and her sexualization of maternity get him off. Or think of how the show supports Eric’s suspicion that Harper is in fact a bad person by having her fuck her coworker Rishi (Sagar Radia) the night before his wedding, knowing he believes her to be a co-conspirator in a plot to get ahead when in fact she’s already betrayed him — a deception so gobsmacking that the sex could, and probably should, be considered some kind of assault. I’ll take those two subplots over any amount of dull therapy-speak in terms of what they can tell us, because they make us feel it, not just nod our heads in agreement.

I love the show’s handling of drugs. It’s shown us addicts, alcoholics, people using intoxicants to self-medicate and self-destruct, for sure. And the rate and volume at which these folks indulge is clearly not intended to be aspirational in any way; it often looks more exhausting than anything else. However, it’s also often made to look like a ton of fun, for the simple reason that it often is. In tonight’s episode, coke breaks down the barriers between Eric and Yasmin. “We just skipped several awkward stages of our relationship!” Eric beams; Yasmin, who by this time is wearing a barrister’s wig, implores him to remember this feeling when they’re sober. Denise, meanwhile, is cavorting around in her bra and her little lawyer bib or whatever they call it over there, doing handstands and launching herself at Eric’s dick at the first opportunity, because the coke made them horny. As they put it in Trainspotting, “We’re not fucking stupid”; drugs feel good, that’s why people do them!

I love the acting, across the board, to the point where, again, I’d be here all night if I ran down everything I liked about everyone on the show. For time-management purposes I’m just going to single out Ken Leung, who plays Eric like a human Hellraiser puzzlebox: fascinating to look at from any direction, liable to eject hook-tipped steel chains into the flesh of friends and enemies alike at a moment’s notice. Demon to some, angel to others, often to the same people. He does this uncanny thing in closeups where he can make his eyes look both dead and too bright to gaze at directly, like someone lit a corpse on fire.

And as a dyed-black-in-the-wool Jon Snow guy, I love the use of Kit Harington as a kind of cringe-comedy character, airdropped in from some other show to make our heroes look like Jeremy Corbyn by comparison. Harington can be a hilarious actor, as anyone who’s seen him play a hunky tennis-playing imbecile in the mockumentary Seven Days in Hell can tell you; his closing “What just happened?” as the power outage blows up his IPO is the perfect comical understatement to end the episode. What just happened? You just watched Industry, you lucky people — one of those rare and precious shows that makes you think “Oh shit, this show’s smarter than I am.” What a feeling. What a show.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.