{"id":263390,"date":"2026-02-02T03:48:12","date_gmt":"2026-02-02T03:48:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/263390\/"},"modified":"2026-02-02T03:48:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T03:48:12","slug":"the-key-to-understanding-the-hbo-show-and-its-complicated-relationships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/263390\/","title":{"rendered":"The key to understanding the HBO show and its complicated relationships."},"content":{"rendered":"

The fourth season of Industry, HBO\u2019s series set in the high-stakes and scandal-ridden world of finance, starts with a couple of people hooking up in a London flat. Their rendezvous is cut short when the man reveals to the woman that he\u2019s a reporter for a financial magazine and he\u2019s looking into the company where the woman works as an executive assistant. The young lady (played by a much-older-now Kiernan Shipka, the Mad Men child star) is furious at the revelation and threatens that an imaginary boyfriend of hers\u2014he\u2019s Black, she says\u2014will soon be home to deal with him. Ideally, a reporter doesn\u2019t use sex to get close to a source. (Can you imagine<\/a>?) But, watching along, I felt a bit of sympathy for the guy, who couldn\u2019t seem to sort out whether he was really on a recon mission or whether he actually just liked the girl. That\u2019s par for the course for Industry, a show that does not ask what the difference is between intimacy and transaction. It just assumes they are the same thing, as the characters screw each other literally and metaphorically.<\/p>\n

I have been an Industry fan since its first season in the grim fall of 2020. I\u2019ve felt validated as the cult hit has gotten renewed again and again, rising to new heights of popularity and depravity each time. The show remains one of the best on television and has always stood apart for two reasons. One, it works great Wall Street capers into the plot, stories that sound too ridiculous to be true but then stack up pretty reasonably against the real-world events<\/a> of the past five years. Two, the characters are all chasing a big sack of returns on investment, but they are mainly worried about not drowning<\/a>. To keep their careers (and thus their lives) on track, they betray each other with a shocking casualness. Money doesn\u2019t corrupt relationships in Industry so much as form them out of whole cloth, but the series is special because its characters don\u2019t quite admit that transactionalism to themselves. If you\u2019re a hungry twentysomething in London, you might want to make a lot of money and have friends, right? The fourth season of the show makes no bones about what a charade that is, even taking it one step further by asking more-interesting questions, such as: If everyone knows that their relationships are built solely on the pound, are there any victims when everything breaks?<\/p>\n

The plot of this season, which premiered in January, pits the series\u2019 two leads, Marisa Abela\u2019s Yasmin and Myha\u2019la\u2019s Harper, in a familiar adversarial position. Harper, a sharp but frequently reckless young woman, has launched her own short-selling-focused hedge fund, betting on the downfall of companies she thinks will fail. She and her business partner and sometimes-mentor Eric (Ken Leung) become fixated on Tender, a deeply sketchy payment platform that makes a lot of its money from processing card transactions on porn sites\u2014\u201cthe PayPal of bukkake,\u201d as the company is called internally. Henry (Kit Harington), Yasmin\u2019s new husband and a member of the British gentry, joins the company as an investor and executive, and Yasmin also gets an office. The couple hope it\u2019ll be a redemption tour after the disastrous flameout of Henry\u2019s former business in Season 3<\/a>. This is the battleground on which the characters will try to ruin each other\u2019s lives this season.<\/p>\n

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By the season\u2019s fourth episode, which aired Sunday, it\u2019s clear that the sexual liaison that opened the season was barely a side dish in a season of transactional intimacy. Season 4 finds Rishi (Sagar Radia), the ex\u2013market maker at the investment bank where the series was once set, in dire straits. Last season, he spiraled out of control as his bookies chased him down over unpaid gambling debts, eventually executing his wife in front of him. This time around, Rishi is stealing inside information from people who might help Harper and Eric\u2019s shorts. They\u2019re paying him with envelopes full of cash, but Rishi is still barely hanging on. Harper and Eric pass off an idea to themselves that they\u2019re just throwing an old buddy some work, rather than paying him scraps to implicate himself in their lucrative conspiracy.<\/p>\n

Eric\u2019s personal life is in shambles too. He\u2019s a terrible father and husband, now split up from his wife after years of picking work over his family. In Sunday\u2019s episode, he embarks on what Harper calls \u201cOperation Normal Guy,\u201d giving an unconvincing performance of what one might deem normal fatherly behavior. He brings his daughter to the fund\u2019s office, a swanky hotel suite, but pays her zero attention beyond offering whatever material luxuries she might want. Wherever this goes, we sense it won\u2019t be good.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Yasmin arranges a sexual encounter between herself, her husband, and Shipka\u2019s executive-assistant character, Hayley. Yasmin\u2019s father sexually abused her as a child and remained an emotional abuser until she let him drown off the railing of his own yacht in Season 3. But now it\u2019s Yasmin with all the power: Hayley has fessed up that she inadvertently let a journalist investigating the company into her home, hoping that Yasmin will protect her. Yasmin feigns feminism and tells her, \u201cI hate when men try to take something that isn\u2019t theirs.\u201d She then coaxes her into her and Henry\u2019s hotel room and instructs her to perform oral sex on Henry as Yasmin watches and directs her poses. Hayley is essentially being trafficked by her superiors at the company\u2014one of the running observations<\/a> about Yasmin\u2019s arc this season is that she has more or less become a Ghislaine Maxwell figure\u2014but afterward, the assistant expresses a certain calmness about the whole thing. She gets Yasmin to acknowledge that the encounter wasn\u2019t consensual, then hikes up her shirt to reveal lingerie and tells Yasmin, \u201cThank you, Mommy.\u201d It turns out everyone\u2019s blackmailing everyone\u2014such is the Industry way.<\/p>\n

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I Went to See the Melania Movie. Now I Know Who\u2019s Buying All Those Tickets.
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

This warped vision of human relationships plays out against a backdrop of a fun financial story. Industry takes good care not to be too fantastical in its world-building. Harper and Eric are on to something with their short position, it\u2019s clear, but they repeatedly run into trouble getting the rest of the financial sector to believe them. \u201cCan we prove it? And then can we be loud enough?\u201d Eric asks Harper. The work of shorting companies is \u201cugly,\u201d \u201canti-power,\u201d and \u201canti-establishment\u201d\u2014Harper doesn\u2019t understand why any of that should be a problem for the two of them, and sets about demonstrating why not as she takes on her friend and foil. Harper and Yasmin are mirrors of each other, one a financial genius who comes from nothing and the other a mediocre worker who comes from everything. But their love story (maybe platonic, maybe not) is always the center of Industry.<\/p>\n

This season, however, they\u2019re on opposite sides of Harper\u2019s big trade. Yas is making plans to try to ruin Harper via a media smear campaign to save Tender, the company now employing both her and her husband. And, somehow, none of this even feels as if it\u2019s at odds with their friendship. Industry posits that once you reach a certain threshold of honesty with another person, you can\u2019t exactly betray them. You can only disappoint them for a while before running back into each other\u2019s arms, then doing it again.<\/p>\n

Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The fourth season of Industry, HBO\u2019s series set in the high-stakes and scandal-ridden world of finance, starts with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":263391,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[156,2592,111,139,69,437],"class_list":{"0":"post-263390","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-hbo","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz","13":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263390\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}