Industry makes young bankers worth following, chiefly by showing how ambition complicates the working day. The performances hold our attention; the sex and excess are less reliable, especially when they crowd out the office politics.
Getting ahead at work is difficult enough without wanting the people who can help to like us as well. Industry builds a good, abrasive workplace drama around young bankers whose professional ambition is tangled up with their private lives. Mickey Down and Konrad Kay’s writing is strongest on the difficulty of judging a colleague who may also be a friend or a rival. We recommend it for that uncomfortable company, with a caveat about how often the after-hours excess interrupts more interesting business.
Office politics give the series a dependable source of tension, because getting on with colleagues is part of getting ahead. The writing allows questions of identity to affect ambition without making each character a tidy representative of a group. People can understand their own disadvantages and still behave badly towards somebody else. That complexity keeps the working relationships interesting, particularly when personal loyalties become difficult to separate from professional ones.
Myha’la, playing Harper Stern, and Marisa Abela, as Yasmin Kara-Hanani, are central to why this company remains watchable. Neither performance requires us to approve of a character before paying attention, and both reward the writing’s willingness to leave people complicated. We felt uneasy watching professional ambition spill into the characters’ sexual relationships. The drama makes it difficult to imagine these people spending an evening together without work entering it, which gives their social lives a pressure that the excess alone cannot supply.
With Adam Lyons, Federico Cesca and Arthur Mulhern among its cinematographers, Industry is most persuasive when it stays with people at work. Steve Summersgill’s production design gives those professional encounters a credible setting without becoming the attraction itself. The surroundings need to make these working relationships believable, and they do. How the colleagues treat one another supplies the interest.
The editing, with Kyle Traynor among the credits, cannot always make the personal complications feel urgent. Too often, working and hooking up settle into a rhythm we can anticipate, and the programme takes too long to make the repetition count. The excess makes sense as behaviour shaped by a demanding professional life. That does not mean every instance is equally interesting to watch.
The wider consequences of the banking business receive less searching attention. Personal conflict repeatedly takes precedence, and the questions raised about the profession can seem secondary to who is getting ahead within it. That is a limitation worth naming, particularly when the writing is otherwise so alert to unequal power. We do not need a lecture on banking, but the people outside these working and social circles deserve some thought.
Try it when there is time to settle into an ensemble, rather than when a plot needs to earn its keep immediately. The appeal depends on growing interested in people whose decisions are not always easy to defend, and that takes some patience. There is no requirement to want them as colleagues.
