HBO’s Industry is the Missing Link between Euphoria and Succession – Vanity Fair

Who knew it was possible to take so much pleasure in watching people banter and brawl and have panic attacks over stuff that means absolutely nothing to you?

By that, I dont mean that the financial worldso stylishly and sexily dramatized in HBOs Industry, launching into season two August 1is something I dont care about. I mean literally that its incomprehensible. The young brokers and analysts spit industry jargon at approximately a million words per minute: a mind-bending barrage of futures and shorts and positioning thats pure yadda yadda yadda to me, as abstract and alien as the subatomic realm of quarks and neutrinos. But it doesnt put me off. In fact, Im enthralled. This trading floor is a killing field of emotional and erotic carnage as much as its a place where fortunes are made and lost in a millisecond.

Lots of people (and critics) I know took a pass on the first first season of Industry, which revolves around a group of college graduates working at Pierpont & Company, a fictional London investment bank. Theyve been hired on a trial basis and know that only half of them will survive an imminent cull (RIF, short for Reduction In Force) and secure permanent jobs. Not that anything is long-lasting or stable in this rapid-turnover world.

Both established traders and the Pierpont managers charged with training and monitoring the new recruits live in a constant state of paranoid anxiety about their quarterly performance; they spend their days cosseting elite clients who might be flight risks. The fast-churn lifestyle demands release, and its found in drugs and alcohol, eruptions of rage, badinage so brutal its basically hazing, and raunchy sex that shreds the rules about not mixing business and pleasure. Quick learners, the students take to the debauched afterwork culture as avidly as the daytime fray of speculation and deal-making.

The core group includes Yasmin (Marisa Abela), a smart and sensual woman from a wealthy Middle Eastern family who gets treated like an errand girl by a male supervisor who cant see past her chic surface; Robert (Harry Lawtey), a working class white boy whod rather sniff coke and sext Yasmin than study markets; and Gus (David Jonsson), a Ghanian-British Etonian who studied classics at Oxford and quickly finds the financial world unfulfilling. Floating at the center of the bunch is Harper (Myhala Herrold), a mysterious, mixed-race young American fueled by voracious ambition and intelligence.

Harper has never been in any doubt that she is an underdog. In the first season, while sitting in a bathroom cubicle, she overhears a pair of posh fellow trainees complaining about how she allegedly has an unfair advantage in the competition for a permanent job, since she enjoys the minority capital of being black and female. (When Harper emerges from her stall, Yasminone of the twois still standing by the sink and simperingly apologizes: I was the less cunty one.). Harpers grit and willingness to do almost anything to get a trade done are what hooked her boss Eric (Ken Leung) into hiring her. He sees a younger version of himself: a scrappy and mischievous American with no pedigree. In season one, Harper returned the favor in a dramatic series of backstabbing maneuvers that kept Eric on top, if only temporarily.

Everything is temporary in Industrys worldan employees value can fall as swiftly as a stock plummets. (Nobody owes anybody a tomorrow here, one Pierpont bigwig says.) And everyone is fake: the new employees, their managers, and the clients alike are engaged in an endless jockeying game of fronting and confidence projection. Grueling office days, whose work rate is sometimes propped up and propelled by semi-legal stimulants, blur into nocturnal sessions of almost harrowing hedonism, fueled by booze and coke and pills of many kinds. The alcohol and the stripes chopped out on the tops of toilets inevitably fuel sexual escapades: one-night stands, threesomes, selfie-porn texts, mutual masturbation via Zoom. Its like a zombie version of the counterculture: all the 1960s demands for erotic liberation and pharmacological freedom have been absorbed, but without any elevation of consciousness and with all the power structures and class hierarchies intact.

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HBO's Industry is the Missing Link between Euphoria and Succession - Vanity Fair