If HBO’s thrilling high-finance series Industry had concluded with its Season 3 finale—as the show’s creators once thought it might—it wouldn’t have been a very happy ending. It would have been a really good one, though! In that episode, titled “Infinite Largesse”—a reference to a Denis Johnson short story about an ad-man has-been—Industry’s characters conspired, kissed, regressed, blustered, held a sub rosa rendezvous down by the river, and bore witness to bloody murder. They said things like “nothing comes from nothing” and “money is peace.” They sold out (and tuned in). Watching it at the time, I was simultaneously left wanting more and feeling like I’d seen way too much, the mark of a top-notch goodbye.
But as we now know, Industry’s story didn’t end there. With this weekend’s Season 4 premiere, “PayPal of Bukkake”—a reference to Peter Thiel’s brainchild, and a sex act—showrunners Mickey Down and Konrad Kay have moved beyond the old Pierpoint & Co. roadshows and written a simultaneously grim and bright new beginning, one imbued with both the thrill of exploration and the discordance of jetlag. “A globe-trotting, sort of conspiracy espionage thriller,” is how Down described the scope and sweep of this new season to me in a recent Zoom interview. “The realm of those kind of films in the ’90s and early noughties.”
Season 4’s opening hour alone takes viewers onto a druggy dance floor and a foggy golf course. It introduces new characters like Max Minghella’s ambitious Whitney Halberstram, who insists that “your story begins when you start telling it,” and Kiernan Shipka’s inscrutable Haley Clay. It references both Austrian banks and the Ghanaian economy. And viewers get the sense this is only a glimpse; that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet; that the itinerary is only going to get much wilder from here.
The Bottom Line
So, what happened in this episode?
When we left off from Industry in the fall of 2024, most of the characters were on the verge of something new and unforeseen. But even as they step briskly ahead into Season 4, it’s clear that they’re bound by familiar old hangups.
Harper (Myhal’la) was poised to start a shadowy new short-selling fund backed by the White Walker–eyed Otto Mostyn, but she now finds herself bristling against both her investors and her employer. Her former boss, Eric (Ken Leung), was pushed off into unemployment with an eight-figure cheque for his troubles, but an early, cushy golf-course retirement does not feel like heaven on earth. Yasmin (Marisa Abela), who abruptly (and rudely!) got engaged at the end of last season to squirearchical dilettante/C-suite failboi Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington), begins Season 4 by telling polite company that her man is regretfully down with a bad cold—when the truth is that he’s lounging aimlessly around his estate in an unbreathable bathrobe, crushing drugs between the heel of a boot and the lid of a harpsichord. Rishi (Sagar Radia), whom we last saw staring down his shattered new reality—in which his own actions led to the violent death of the mother of his child—is back as a fallen streetwise op, getting his dopamine hits and paychecks through fun ’n’ flirty acts of impulse and instinct, same as it ever was.
In each case, everyone is still extremely themselves. But then there are all the other themselveses: the whole batch of new characters that are just hitting the Industry scene.
At the very beginning of “PayPal of Bukkake,” two of those newbies get together during one crazy night. One is a dance floor gawker played by Stranger Things’ Charlie Heaton who winds up being an enterprise journalist from FinDigest named James Dycker. The other is Haley, a crazy-chill coolgirl exec assistant who made the mistake of answering some emails out of professional courtesy. And throughout the episode, two other fresh (if recognizable) faces—Tender executives Whit and Jonah, played by Minghella and stoner portrayer turned Obama staffer Kal Penn—repeatedly banter and butt heads about the direction of their payment processing platform, whose clients sure do include a lot of purveyors of porn.
It doesn’t take long before the old world of Industry and the new have well and truly collided. Harper’s two minions at work are the returning ingenue Sweetpea Golightly (Miriam Petche) and the sardonic newcomer Kwabena Bannerman (Ted Lasso’s Toheeb Jimoh). Yasmin seeks to broker working harmony between Whit and an ascending politician, even as her own marriage seems to be souring. Harper and Whit scratch each other’s backs, so to speak, and circle one another’s bodies of work.
By the time “PayPal of Bukkake,” ah, finishes, it has featured a boardroom mutiny at Tender predicated on, among other things, personal hygiene; an iPhone password being observed by Rishi’s eagle eye at the pub; and a bona fide word o’ the day: sesquipedalian. There are sex toys and short sales; Harper and Eric getting their messed-up band back together (maybe); Harper and Yas drifting apart; and as the episode ends, Henry looming just outside of the frame as a generational chaos agent, a real toddler-in-chief capable of upending even the most elite spaces.
Turns of Leverage
On Industry, characters love borrowing trouble—and are always up to double down. Whose bets are paying off this week, and who is in the midst of a downward spiral?
Leveling up: Newcomer Whitney Halberstram spends most of this introductory episode tightening his grip on power at Tender—while his now-former friend and business partner, Jonah, crashes all the way out of the C-suite. Now, might Whit have some skeletons in his closet? Almost certainly, but for the time being, they’re neatly hidden somewhere behind that salmon-colored sweater and hefty strap-on. Underestimate this guy at your own boardroom peril.
Credit crunched? Harper Stern can’t be doing too badly when she’s got that bitchin’ four-piece suit, but the girl hasn’t been having the best few days at the office. Between Roland’s middle-management hovering, Otto’s disdain, Kwabena’s midcoital preoccupation with Sweetpea, the glass shards in Harper’s office carpet, and the (passive-aggressive?) greeting card from her mom, she’s really getting it from all angles. Can a reunion with her old mentor (and/or a phone call with the guy from FinDigest) put things back on track?
On the watch list: Is it possible for Rishi to ever regain his old trader swagger, or has he forever doomed himself to a life of paper-bagged cash transfers? And are Yasmin’s ongoing machinations actually going to add value—or just yield dwindling returns?
Tender Offers
Is that a “private banker in your pocket,” or are you just happy to see me? Here’s the latest haps at Tender, the most ambitious “bank killer” in Canary Wharf.
“YOUR FUTURE IS A MOUNTAIN,” it says in neon on the Tender HQ walls. (Employees love to be reminded that their day-to-day is an exposed uphill climb. But imagine the views!) “To think this all started importing dupe BAPE hoodies from Puyang,” says Jonah during his and Whit’s last supper, reflecting on the humble origins of their rapidly-expanding empire. Whit smirks in return: “Michelangelo made David,” he muses. “You birthed a platform for rerouting porn payments.” Whit doesn’t seem like the nostalgic sort, though, and as Season 4 begins, it’s clear that he’s hell-bent on a pivot. What’s a lot murkier is the what-to, and the why.
“Human perversion is a Hydra,” argues Jonah, a real ball-knower when it comes to the hedonist mindset, about why parting ways with horndog merchants would be tough. “Jerking off is recession-proof,” he adds later.
Whit, meanwhile, seeks to trade all this licentiousness in for something more grown-up: a legit banking license that can help Tender launder its image into something more reputable. He isn’t interested in aligning any longer with businesses like the OnlyFans-esque Siren (nee “Colonel Creampie”). His vision is much grander: “Our comp is no longer Stripe or PayPal,” Whit says after getting the board to oust Jonah. “It’s not even Chase or Goldman Sachs. We’re going to be all these things and more.”
But what’s all this then with the weekly trips to Africa, and this bowl-cut bro named Ferdinand who is always lurking around, and the AWOL former assistant? Also, just when did Whit become all tight with Yas? As a day-one Industry viewer I felt kind of affronted when he called her a “dear friend,” because I think I would know about this dear friend, thankyouverymuch. It was a lot like the feeling of squaring off against a longtime bestie’s newer bizarro-buds at a wedding.
“Look, I think these people are capable of almost anything to stop someone looking too closely,” the FinDigest reporter warns Harper near the end of “PayPal of Bukkake.” It seems likely that we’re about to find out what happens when an unstoppable force meets Harper’s level of oppositional defiance.
Mergers and Acquisitions
Activist investor? I hardly know’r! This is a judgment-free zone to discuss emerging … corporal synergies in Industry and do our due diligence on who’s doin’ it.
While a lot of things about Industry have changed over the years, the show has consistently pitched two plot tentpoles: (1) getting rich and (2) getting laid. That still appears to be the case in Season 4. Despite the episode’s title (and Industry’s history), this episode does not, in fact, showcase any bodily fluids. But it does have some very choice words from Haley that I’m too shy to reproduce here, and some very short shorts on that new gal pal of Eric’s. Plus, there’s Jonah’s “real pommel horse” story (fittingly, I snorted), and Whit enunciating lines like “ebony GILF gets force-fed” while glancing professorially over his glasses.
And obviously, the episode also revolves around the reliably randy Harper. She schtups her new(ish?) trader, Kwabena. (Jimoh, an Industry rookie, told me over Zoom a few days ago that this scene was the first one he filmed. “My first day on set was asking Harper if we should do anal,” he said with a laugh. “I was like, that is the most Industry welcome anyone could get, isn’t it?”)
Harper also delivers a finish him–level blow to James Ashford’s ego that actually shatters glass. And with Whit’s encouragement, she gets unforgettably literal with the phenomenon famously described by Michael Lewis in his seminal late-’80s Wall Street memoir, Liar’s Poker:
To this day the phrase brings to my mind the image of an elephant’s trunk swaying from side to side. Swish. Swash. Nothing in the jungle got in the way of a Big Swinging Dick. That was the prize we coveted. [...] And of course, no one actually said, ‘When I get out onto the trading floor, I’m going to be a Big Swinging Dick.’ It was more of a private thing. But everyone wanted to be a Big Swinging Dick, even the women. Big Swinging Dickettes.
If I’m being honest, I actually had trouble suspending disbelief in this scene, NOT because of any Whitkinkshaming or any flaws in Myhal’a’s performance but because it immediately made me think about Abbi in Broad City. You never forget your first, as they say.
Watch Watch
Time is a flat circle, ideally powered by quartz. Here, we examine Industry’s tick-tocking timepiece(s) of the week.
In an interview with the delightfully-named Dimepiece at the end of Season 3, Down and Kay laughed that one of the faux prop watches worn on an early season of Industry left a character with “a green mark” on their arm. (Miss u, Harry Lawtey!) But that was then, and this is now. So the pair also shared their aspirations for featuring some real wristware this time around: “Season 4, we’re going for Patek and Richard Mille,” Kay said.
Based on my squinting assessment of Whit’s watch this week, which is hard to get a full look at but does seem a lot like Richard Mille, they were successful in achieving that particular KPI. Like the watch itself, Whit’s gears are visibly turning.
Get Me the Comps!
On the one hand, past performance neither guarantees nor predicts future results, as the SEC requires investment firms to remind clients. On the other hand, plus ça change! Here are some of the real-world stories that might be relevant to Industry’s fictional realm.
On Industry: Eric brings up the megafund Bridgewater on the phone to Harper: “You want to know why people think Bridgewater is the best one in the world?” he asks. “It’s not underlying returns. It’s ’cause [founder Ray] Dalio crows louder than the rest when they’re holding a good position, and shuts up when they’re on a bad run.”
IRL: Inside all of us there are two Ray Dalios. There’s the titan who published Principles, a volume of his principles, like: “Managing the people who report to you should feel like ‘skiing together.’” And then there’s the oddball despot featured in Rob Copeland’s investigative tome The Fund—who sounds like a real piece of work! In contrast to what Eric says, it doesn’t seem like either Ray Dalio ever pipes the fuck down.
On Industry: Team Tender 2.0 decides to cut ties with their embattled cash cow client, Siren, an OnlyFans competitor that insists, “We’re not a porn company! We’re an online subscription aggregator!”
IRL: I can’t recommend more highly this 2011 New York feature on “The Geek-Kings of Smut.” Come for the competitive foosball circuit lore and Brazzers coaching tree; stay for the respectable holdco names like “Manwin” and “MindGeek.” Oh, and for an amazing postscript all these years later? Today I learned that PornHub is owned by, literally, “Ethical Capital Partners.”
On Industry: Tender gets roughly 23 percent of its income from “alternative merchants”—the “euphemistic bull in the earning reports,” per Jonah, that basically translates to: gambling and porn.
IRL: In its 2018 earnings report, the erstwhile “high-risk” German payment processor Wirecard reported nearly a third of its transaction volume came from the category of “digital goods,” a catchall comprising: “Internet portals, download sites, app software companies, career portals, dating portals, gaming providers, telecommunications providers, Internet telephony, sports betting, and gambling such as poker.”
Open Interest
What are we left wondering?
- First and foremost, what the heck happened to Whit’s former assistant at Tender?! And was Haley’s job reference bluff a savvy now-you-know-I-know move—or a dumb misstep that’ll tip off Whitney to her journo-fueled suspicions?
- What does it say on Eric’s golf buddy’s hat? After extensive squinting and googling, I have come to the conclusion that it says “PHUK LUZIN,” just like (checks notes) Joe Pesci’s hat at a 2001 celeb-am? What does it mean? WHAT DOES IT MEAN??
- I have rewound MANY times, and I still can’t tell whether that one member of the Tender board of directors is played by the actor Jon Gries? It would actually make so much sense for his White Lotus character to be somehow laundering his dead wife’s money through an operation like this one. (Side question: Which cinematic universe crossover tracks most cleanly: (a) Kumar rebranded as Jonah; (b) Sally Draper growing up to be the executive assistant of a guy who is always flying to Africa; (c) Divya from The Social Network usurping a murky new payments venture?)
- At the end of Season 3, Harper’s shadowy deal with Otto was described as “an all-shorts fund in New York.” What happened to keep Harper on this side of the pond? And here I’d been hoping to see her hit Dimes Square…
- Best band name of the episode? My initial thought was some shoegaze-y group called “Ambient Fog,” but I actually think there’d be something compelling and avant-garde about, like, a garage band with the name “Separately Managed Account.”
- Speaking of America, I wonder how Rob is doing with his hallucinogen venture? I miss that lad so much. Forever in our hearts, Harry Lawtey.
