Stream It Or Skip It?

When everything that fans of HBO’s Industry knew about the characters, where they work and what they do blew up at the end of the third season, there must have been a lot of speculation as to how the show would recover. What they may not have realized while watching is that creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay knew that the story had evolved beyond Pierpoint & Co. The first episode of Season 4 proves that.

INDUSTRY SEASON 4: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: The camera pushes in on a window, with a man putting on his coat going out. Then we see a woman in front of an office building, looking at her phone.

The Gist:  The two meet each other at a club, they dance, take MDMA (at least one of them does), then they go to her place together. The next morning, he gives her his name: Jim Dycker (Charlie Heaton), a reporter that has been trying to get in touch with someone at the payment processing company Tender, and the woman, Haley Clay (Kiernan Shipka), is the only one who returns his calls. She gets understandably enraged, and threatens him with a knife.

Harper Stern (Myha’la) is now in charge of her own fund at the firm owned by fiancier — and now member of parliament — Otto Mostyn (Roger Barclay). She’s brought Sweetpea Golightly (Miriam Petche) with her after Pierpoint’s demise. It’s an all-short-sale fund, which means she’s betting on companies to fail. She’s chafing under the supervision that she’s under, which she thinks is more restrictive than other fund managers. She also thinks that shorting companies like the adult site Siren is just fine, despite the optics.

At Tender, the company’s co-founder, Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella) is concerned about his business partner and the CEO, Jay Jonah Atterbury (Kal Penn). Jonah seems to be hungover all the time and he is still treating the publicly-traded company as a startup. In addition, Whit’s vision for Tender is to make it more bank-like, which means that processing payments for clients like Siren just won’t fly, especially as an online safety bill makes its way through parliament. He doesn’t want the company to be known as “the PayPal of bukkake.”

After Harper gets upbraided by Otto after she unilaterally called for her fund to be gated, where all outflows are stopped, she gets in touch with her old Pierpoint boss Eric Tao (Ken Leung), who seems to be living the good life as a retiree in the U.S. He gives her advice, but also listens to her thoughts about the two of them perhaps getting into business together.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Like we said when we reviewed Season 3, Industry is like Billions crossed with Succession.

Our Take: In Season 3 of Industry, creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay had already started to break up the core of characters that had coalesced at Pierpoint, so it’s not such a shock that they decided to remove Pierpoint as that nucleus.

The young group of interns that started on the show five years ago are all on to their own things. Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) is now a full-on socialite who introduces Harper to Whitney at a party, and she’s still wrangling with the status of her relationship with Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington). Rishi Ramandi (Sagar Radia) is still trying to put the pieces back together after his gambling debts came home to roost. Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey) is… well, we don’t know where he is.

But it’s safe to say that the show doesn’t need Pierpoint to show the high stakes and massive pressures that the characters we’ve followed since Season 1 are under. Harper has always been cunning and confident, and she continues to show that here; as soon as Otto tells her, for instance, that he hired her as “a face” when being “woke” was still a big deal, she knows that it’s time to pull the rip cord, which is why she gets in touch with Eric.

Down and Kay also feel that it’s a good time to introduce some new characters and scenarios, and populate them with high-profile hires, like Heaton, Shipka, Minghella and Penn. They’re slid in without a lot of exposition, and they seem to fit in like they’ve always been there. The casting helps, as all four of those new cast members can handle the fast-talking, the financial jargon, and all of the rest of what goes on in this series (including the sexy parts… more on that below).

Performance Worth Watching: Max Minghella’s character Whitney Halberstram is about as calculating a character as this show as had, as we see when he throws Jonah under the bus to enact his vision of Tender. He’ll be an interesting match with Harper.

Sex And Skin: Lots of nudity and sex in this episode, with both scenes involving Harper. One of the reasons that we think Whit and Harper will be a good match is what he has her put on after a raucous round of sex.

Parting Shot: Henry Muck depressingly plays a harpisohord in what we think is his mansion, next to a sign saying “DO NOT PLAY.”

Sleeper Star: We’re curious to see what Shipka does as Haley, who seems to like to party. Also, after mainlinining the last season of Stranger Things over the holidays, it’s good to see Charlie Heaton playing an adult and speaking in his native accent.

Most Pilot-y Line: Harper’s assistant, Kwabena Bannerman (Toheeb Jimoh), puts his foot in his mouth when discussing having Siren in his browser history. “I don’t consider myself a prolific masturbater,” he says as he tries to dig his way out of his inappropriateness.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Industry is as insane as its ever been in its fourth season. But it’s a controlled insanity, with characters that we may never want to break bread with, but have become fascinating to watch as the circumstances around them change.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.