‘Industry’ Review: Season 4 Gets the Gang Back Together for More Delicious Scheming

When its third season concluded, there wasn’t an obvious pathway for Industry to continue. Created by Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, the series started out as a workplace drama, but with Pierpoint & Co. having been sold off and its London office shuttered, Industry’s main characters were scattered to the wind. But the finance world is all about projecting confidence no matter how unstable your position has become, so perhaps it’s no surprise to see the series come roaring back, every bit as self-assured as it’s always been.

At the start of the fourth season, which proves to be as gleefully provocative and endlessly perverse as those that came before, an act of economy-shaking industrial espionage is carried out in a pub while finance bros down pints and trade porn clips. Meanwhile, the psychopathic Harper (Myha’la) shreds a birthday card from her mother and enjoys a moment of what looks like true inner peace while looking into a mirror, wearing nothing but a strap-on.

Last season, Yasmin (Marisa Abela) got what seemed like a Jane Austen-style happy ending after marrying Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington) and moving into his manor. As for Harper, she started a fund of her own—the natural endpoint for a lone wolf whose only real pleasure in life is being right when everyone else is wrong. Yet, given how far apart these characters have grown, it’s impressive how quickly and elegantly they’re pulled back into the same orbit, namely through the introduction of Tender, a financial tech startup with a past that’s almost certainly shadier than its slick new CEO, Whitney (Max Minghella), is willing to admit.

Pretty soon, Industry has constructed a spider’s web of plotlines tying each of the main characters to the new company and giving them the perfect excuse to start screwing each other over all over again. The series makes expert use of every piece on its board, with the returning characters all evolving—and sometimes devolving—in satisfying ways. After uncovering the suspicious inner workings of Tender, Sweetpea (Miriam Petche) becomes Harper’s fiercest lieutenant, while Henry becomes more intriguing once his particular blend of über-privilege and crippling self-doubt is traced back to a childhood trauma.

Whitney’s assistant, Haley (Kiernan Shipka), makes for this season’s wild card, with the actress playing on and against the innocence of her most famous roles—Sally Draper from Mad Men and Sabrina Spellman from Chilling Adventures of Sabrina—to create a childlike character who seems to wander smilingly from one obscene situation to another, only ever half understanding the things that are going on around her. Or perhaps that’s just what Haley wants us to think.

Almost every conversation in Industry is both a seduction and a swordfight, with the actors ruthlessly unloading the show’s dense tracts of dialogue with a theatrical brio. That’s especially true of Ken Leung, who—as Harper’s ex-mentor, Erik Tao—has continually been given the show’s stagiest dialogue and continually made it ring true by snarling out lines from behind the haunted stare of a man who knows that he’s sold his soul.

Erik’s relationship with Harper continues to serve as the dark-but-not-quite-dead heart of the series: Their dynamic is unquestionably toxic, but there’s a shard of something like love buried somewhere in there. And that’s the magic trick that Industry continues to pull: In the midst of all its lurid, Machiavellian scheming, it gives us a glint of something more human.

The characters are all terrible people who spend their daylight hours operating as professional psychopaths and their downtime coming up with perverse ways to make themselves miserable. The bedroom antics and boardroom battles are, of course, delicious to watch, but the tiny glimmers of vulnerability that the players display is enough to keep us invested in their success.