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Industry is the HBO drama set in the highest echelons of finance and power, that spotlights the truly toxic tangle of relationships, politics and greed.
The season saw the twisted friendship between characters Harper and Yasmin, played by actors Myha’la and Marisa Abela respectively, reach a boiling point as they each fell in deeper with enigmatic tech execs at different companies.
Today on Commotion, culture critics Chris Murphy and Roxana Hadadi join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to reflect on the season finale, and what the show helps us understand about the cost of success.
We’ve included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.
WATCH | Today’s episode on YouTube:
Elamin: Roxana, we should start by saying, what is the thing that makes Industry so worth your time?
Roxana: I think what it is for me is it has all of the fascinations of, like, a Steven Soderbergh process piece — like something that is very detail-oriented, very elemental, and it is taking place in this cloistered, exclusive, impenetrable world of finance. [It] starts out in banking finance, as you mentioned, and then this season it grows bigger to take on all manners of class. So since we’re in the U.K., it’s the land of gentry and the aristocracy. It’s also government power. And, how does all of that work?
I think that it’s an incredibly ambitious show, and sort of making this argument — which I personally agree with — that capitalism is toxic and is killing all of us. But it does it in this very entertaining, relationship-forward way. And it’s gotten a lot of comparisons to Mad Men because of that, right? Like, these people working in this industry that they know is corrupt, and yet it’s all we have to get ahead…. So I think that story is super relatable and digestible for a lot of us. And then … [the] great acting, great cinematography, great style of the show is the cherry on top.
Elamin: I will say that to me, watching Industry is— honestly, the arc is always watching people figure out exactly the point at which they go like, “Oh, I have to give up a bit of my soul to do this.” … And then the battle ensues.…
Chris, I’ve got to say that all of these characters, we get exposed to all of the toxic and despicable parts of them. But we also get … windows into their traumas and the things that made them that way. We talk about Harper — this is someone who started without a college education, raised by a single mom, truly a striver. Yas is someone that’s unwilling to let go of this survivor narrative that she has. But as we sort of see all these people be … really bad people, and this is where maybe their bad behavior comes from, why is that so compelling for us to watch?
Chris: Well, I mean, we love to see flickers of humanity in the worst people, right? I mean, that’s sort of what any narrative structure is based on. We don’t want to see nice, happy people doing nice, happy things all day. What’s the point of that? Where’s the fun in that? And, as Roxana said … so much of this is inspired and influenced by real things that are happening in our real world, that are impacting us and affecting us whether we know it directly or not.
Seeing these narrative turns of these people— it’s so easy to just call Harper a sociopath, but … that’s actually not correct, right? She has her reasons…. She might not be a good person. She might not always do the morally right thing, but it’s so much more interesting to engage with people who seem to be despicable and to see why they might be that way, or what compels them to be that way, than to either just write them off or to not engage with them whatsoever. I think it’s human nature to want to know why bad people do bad things.
You can listen to the full discussion from today’s show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.
Panel produced by Jess Low.