This article contains spoilers through Season 3 of Industry.
Midway through the third season of HBO’s Industry, the audience gets a taste of what life is actually like for Rishi (played by Sagar Radia), a hotshot trader who works at Pierpoint & Co., the fictional multinational investment bank in London where the show is largely set. He owes a lot of money to a bald, big-bodied bookie. His accounts and cards are maxed out and in the red. He has a raging gambling addiction, which he funds by persuading his co-workers to place unsound horse-racing bets through him. On top of all that, Rishi consumes loads of cocaine—which, at one point, causes his raw nose to bleed onto his newborn baby, as he watches a young colleague pose nude on her OnlyFans.
The stand-alone Rishi episode was a perfect example of why audiences flocked to Industry in its third season, which just finished. In its first two seasons, Industry played like an erotic office drama—but this year, the show evolved into a financial thriller, with characters caught up in a high-stakes game where the ultra-wealthy wield unimaginable power and manipulate public systems (such as Parliament and the press) for their personal benefit. Watching this season, I was reminded of a psychological concept dating back to the 1950s called “locus of control.” If you believe that you command your own destiny—that your actions and behaviors heavily influence the course of your life—then you have an internal locus of control. An external locus of control means that you think your actions have a limited effect; the currents of the outside world will instead determine what happens to you, regardless of how you act.
What makes Industry such a rich viewing experience is how its locus of control bends toward the external. This season, the main characters—Harper (Myha’la Herrold), Yasmin (Marisa Abela), and Rob (Harry Lawtey), whom we first met as fresh-faced junior employees at Pierpoint—stood at a crossroads. Should Harper cozy up to Otto Mostyn (Roger Barclay), a billionaire who looks, acts, and sounds like a semi-reformed Nazi? Should Yasmin choose the potential to live a normal-ish life with Rob—or should she marry a well-connected entrepreneur for protection that Rob can’t give her? Should Rob, the working-class striver, leave Pierpoint behind and seek something meaningful to anchor his life?
On the surface, these decisions appear to be deeply personal, based on a distinct, internal logic. But in actuality, each character is bumping up against the limits placed on them by potent forces beyond their reach. Every time Harper, Yasmin, and Rob think they’ve taken control of some aspect of their life, powerful, behind-the-scenes figures pop up to remind them how little they understand. Episode by episode, the show wrestles with the financialization of everything, wherein the cold logic of the market extends into every facet of human activity. By the finale, the choices our main trio make feel inevitable, almost predetermined.
The economist and philosopher Adam Smith described free markets as having an “invisible hand” that guides our behavior, and believed that even selfish human beings could be made to act for the public good if business conditions were just right. Industry suggests otherwise: In the show, climate-friendly “green tech” turns out to be a fraud, and earnest-seeming champions of the cause ditch their morals and end up chasing profit when the market turns on them. Industry’s characters would like to think they’re capable of doing good in this ruthless world. But they can’t—not really.
Because of its visceral intensity, and its focus on drugs and sex and money, Industry has typically been compared to Succession and Euphoria. But Industry more closely resembles Game of Thrones and The Wire––shows where characters must navigate long-standing institutions without making a fatal misstep (which, in Industry’s case, usually means getting fired). In Industry, everything flows out of Pierpoint, which generates its own culture, politics, and action. The bank’s motto is “People are our capital,” which might as well translate to “Everything, even intimate human connection, is exploitable for personal gain and profit.” Its employees come in with their own unique attitude, but we see what happens when their aspirations collide with the callous systems that manage global capitalism.
Take Rishi. His job at Pierpoint closely mimics the chaos of his life outside work. He executes trades, overseeing his desk’s profits and losses—basically, he takes bets on which way the market will swing. During his stand-alone episode, we learn that Rishi is risking about half a billion pounds of the bank’s money on a trade that seems unlikely to pay off. Once Rishi’s boss, the menacing Eric Tao (Ken Leung), learns how gigantic Rishi’s position is, he demands that Rishi stop trading and calls security; Rishi’s behavior has been so irresponsible that he must be forced from the building.
Then, in classic Industry fashion, the market suddenly reverses. The conservative Tories running the government roll back some inscrutable aspect of their agenda. The line chart on the Bloomberg terminal inexplicably jumps vertical, and in a blink, Rishi’s big loss becomes an £18 million profit. Rishi’s appetite for risk fuses with his job as a trader betting on the market; the two become one, the trader and gambler become indistinguishable, and their fate is decided by total chance.
Once Rishi’s position turns profitable, his lovable and anxious co-worker, Anraj, says to him, “You’re not even a good trader––you’re just lucky!” Rishi responds triumphantly, “Tell me, what’s the difference?” The real question is which came first: Has Rishi’s addictive personality and the impunity with which he bets on horses bled into his work? Or have his years in finance scrambled his brain and turned him into a degenerate gambler, both at the office and outside it? Luck saves Rishi this particular time—but that kind of luck is not reliable. He quits Pierpoint and gets double-crossed by Harper. Then, the bookie he’s in debt to shoots and kills his wife, as revenge. It’s a miserable end to a miserable arc—and, in a true exception given how the show usually shakes out, Rishi faces the consequences of his actions. It’s up to him whether he finally looks inward, and digests the damage he’s wrought.
This season, as Industry’s fresh-faced junior traders come of age in Pierpoint’s cutthroat culture and decide where they go next, we’re able to see how external events limit the horizon of choices before them. Yasmin seeks protection among the billionaire class because that’s where she comes from, what she knows. Harper, working for her hedge fund, becomes more merciless than ever; she craves control and strength, and there’s only one path to becoming a major player. Both Harper and Yasmin make their choice, yet are still trapped in the game. Rob, alone, manages to make a clean break from the posh world of London that he’s long yearned to fit into. Realizing he’ll always be expendable, he moves on with his life by leaving for America. He takes back control—his decision actually has an effect on his life—but he does so by giving up his position as a cog in this immense system. It’s a level of humility that his co-workers may never reach.
Even though so much about the world of high finance feels remote and inhuman––rows of monitors, beeping Bloomberg terminals, plate glass, gray everything––Industry lets us put ourselves inside the lives of these characters. Peel back the financial jargon, the extreme wealth, the backroom deals and market manipulation, and what you see are young people and their hopes and wishes running headlong into a brick wall. It’s a thrill to watch what they decide to do after that point of collision and ask yourself not if you would do something different—but could you?
