Industry season four review – This is unflinching, merciless five-star television

I am routinely asked, by friends and family, for television recommendations. It’s my job, after all. And there are plenty of shows I love recommending – Mad Men, Gilmore Girls, M*A*S*H – and feel confident won’t reflect badly on either party. And then there’s Square Mile drama Industry, a show that is so good that it deserves to be recommended but so icky that watching it makes me feel like an unbathed incel. The fact that it returns on BBC One this week, for its fourth season, with more hype than ever, is a sign that its vicious satire is hitting the mark.

Tender – a payments processor for seedy porn and gambling sites – is trying to go legit. Its founders, Whitney (Max Minghella) and Jonah (Kal Penn), are applying for a banking licence, a task that requires the involvement of both financial institutions and government officials. But is there something fishy about this clean-up act for the self-anointed “PayPal of bukkake”? The process of going straight brings Tender into the orbit of both Harper (Myha’la), burning through another volatile self-started fund, and Yasmin (Marisa Abela), whose primary concern seems to be massaging the ego of her husband, Henry (Kit Harington), who has slipped into substance abuse since the failure of his start-up, Lumi. “I failed upwards and then failed totally,” he laments. “There are no second acts.” But Tender’s search for legitimacy needs some roots in British society, offering Henry and Yasmin a chance to leverage their aristocratic ties.

When Industry first appeared in November 2020 – at the height of Covid-era uncertainty – it focused on the psychological Battle Royale among City graduates. Those interns are now masters of the universe, controlling hedge funds, operating reckless shorts, and stabbing one another in the back (and front). If they learnt anything from the brutalising experience of being subordinate, it was only how to execute the same brutality on their own subordinates. Trauma is, after all, cyclical, and the cycles in Industry come around with the speed and clamour of fairground teacups. Here, in its fourth season, the show feels like it has matured and the expectation of humanity is restricted. That makes the punctures of pathos more powerful than ever.

The cast deserve much of the credit for turning Industry into one of the best shows on TV. Myha’la has evolved Harper from a prickly outsider into an unpredictable shark. She has a face that can slip between innocent girlishness and dead-eyed cruelty at the twitch of a muscle. Bringing in Kit Harington, too, has proven a masterstroke. He might have the abs of a Hollywood leading man, but he plays Henry as believably pathetic, a coddled egg becoming increasingly scrambled. Harington was the first “big name” to join the regular cast, but this series adds several more: Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka as a slippery ingenue, Stranger Things’s Charlie Heaton as a muckraking financial hack, as well as Minghella and Penn as sparring founders. The expansion of the Industry universe might’ve risked diluting its impact, but, instead, it relieves some of the show’s oppressive claustrophobia. The myopic power-struggle of Harper and Yasmin is still at the drama’s heart (“do you know why I do this?” Harper asks her business partner Eric (Ken Leung), “Because I enjoy it, and I’m f***ing good at it”) but there is now occasional relief from the internecine tension.

The show’s writers, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, have also grown in both aspiration and confidence. They have a good ear for smutty dialogue (“jerking off is recession proof”) and social commentary (“there should be a tariff on podcast equipment”), but, crucially, they remain relentlessly committed to the show’s manifesto of unlikability. Not only is every character battling their inherent selfishness, but the narrative is unflinching. Rishi (Sagar Radia), who was put through the wringer in the third season, is shown no mercy here. It gives the show the power to shock. Even though the financial machinations remain (largely) impenetrable, they’re also less consequential than ever. Industry is not about deals but alliances, not about contracts but truces; it is a show about the fragility of any relationship in the face of greed and ambition.

In its fourth season, Industry feels like a show with a clear identity. Human nature in all its beautiful ugliness. But Down and Kay keep expanding the canvas, bringing new players in while exiting others. It makes Industry feel kinetic, electric, even while it’s giving you no one to root for and nothing to believe in. Perhaps that’s its ultimate statement on capitalism: inexorable momentum, for no good reason.