Growing Pains: The industry has shown that bigger is not always better | television

THere’s the much-talked about Growing Up in Industry, the hit HBO/BBC drama series about the cutthroat financial world of London. The characters are poetic and quietly incoherent (to the average person) about stocks, shorts, asset values ​​and private money. Charismatic entrepreneurs sell the latest green energy pioneer or democratic bank, or, in the words of one particularly unsavory character on a show full of scoundrels, “the Paypal of bukkake.” Everyone embraces and sanctifies the profit motive.

Naturally, there is a lot of hot air. In the show’s acrimonious nexus between business, politics and global media – less a fun mirror than a high-budget five-minute impressionistic spectacle passed on by X – your value is not in dollars or pounds but in narrative confidence. “We don’t need proof, because we finally have a good story to tell,” says one short seller. Cookbooks can be explained as “just an imbalance between my speed of vision and my speed of organization,” according to the most elusive fintech entrepreneur Whitney Halberstram, played by Max Minghella in wonderfully creepy fashion, in the latest episode of Season 4. The gap between them is “where smart people always make money.”

It’s also where The Industry, largely co-created, written and directed by former financiers Conrad Kaye and Mickey Down, finds itself in its dispiriting fourth season, an unlikely blow that has strained its previous governing structure in favor of unbridled growth and ambition. It’s unlikely that the show has been a hidden gem on HBO for years, second-tier in popularity even though it’s beloved by its niche audience; I was hooked by the first season’s veritable depiction of a modern graduate program at a fictional London investment bank, and I’ve been hawking it like a day trader at Pierpoint & Co ever since, buoyed by its entertaining sound bath of financial arguments and its distinctive image of late-millennial business.

It’s also unlikely that Kay and Down will set their show’s egos on fire in Season 3, having staked their hard-earned loyalty on the audience’s voracious appetite. Pierpoint closed, for reasons I can’t begin to understand (thankfully, financial acumen was never the goal), stripping the show of its beloved central periphery. Previously unknown ensemble stars such as David Johnson and Harry Lawty departed, while new regulars such as Kit Harington, who plays Sir Henry Mock, a well-meaning but disastrous aristocrat and businessman, were promoted to series regulars, thus flipping the show’s distinctive bottom-up perspective – an image of the wealthy drawn by hard-working junior staff – back towards the top. To embody their cross-section of wealth and power in the UK, Kay and Dawn hire alumni of bigger shows like Mad Men (Kiernan Shipka, as a scheming executive assistant) and Stranger Things (Charlie Heaton, as an aggravatingly unethical journalist).

As a long-time fan, I greeted this expansion with caution. The third season finale, which swung around the Muck’s Downton Abbey-esque estate and saw its main enemies – Myha’la’s crusty investor Harper Stern, and Marisa Abella’s equally Machiavellian heiress Yasmine Cara Hanani – sell what little remnants of their humanity they have for windfalls (a billionaire’s fund and an aristocratic marriage, respectively), comes dangerously close to pure provocation and a murderous fixation on the wealthy. The industry has never lacked for top performers in the industry, but the speed of vision seems to far outpace Kay and Dawn’s ability to nail it. In the face of privileging Emerald Fennell-like sentiment over anything coherent like a personality, I missed the power plays of the trading floor, but no less wigged, and the comparatively mundane but no less important compromises of giving one’s youth to a plutocratic institution. The capitalist mantra of “grow or die” seemed like an unfortunate cloak to wear.

But take it upon themselves they did. Perhaps Season 4 is, just like the global financial elite, an often unfounded fever dream of excess, wealth, and technocratic menace. Yas and Harper, who have long since graduated from humiliating coffee runs on the trading floor, are comfortably ensconced in the halls of power and dueling a ridiculous Russian puppet from the big bads up to the Russians themselves. (It’s as vague as it gets.) Sex, drugs, and power games have always been part of the industry’s DNA — the first three seasons are almost entirely rejuvenated on television — but this season’s dalliances have more than just a whiff of complacency, as if rejoicing in HBO’s limits in pure provocation; In a sea of ​​extremes, the midseason trio between Yas, Henry and Hayley collides without a thrilling surprise.

The hallmarks of the old series remain, namely the sparkling enthusiasm between Yas and Harper, and the wonderful, inexpressible bond between Harper and her mentor Eric Tao (Ken Leung), a prickly platonic soulmate in the TV Hall of Fame with Mad Men’s Don Draper and Peggy Olson. At least once in an episode, as when Eric finally expresses filial pride in Harper while also professionally breaking up with her, the show’s signature arrow of sublime pressure pierced me, and I slid from my couch to the floor. But across the sprawling landscape, from the halls of Parliament to private jets to shell companies in Accra, the previously meticulous stakes of the show were never inferior to the atmosphere of corrupt, racialized chaos and rampant doom. It was never unstimulating to watch, often entertaining and downright exhausting. I guess it felt like being alive in 2026.

Maybe that’s why they’ve never been more popular. Season 4, which concludes Sunday, is its most popular ever, averaging 1.7 million viewers per episode — not Game of Thrones numbers, but within viewing range — and earning a fifth and final season. Viewers have responded positively to both the industry’s narrative of elite threat and contagious amorality, as well as its meta-narrative of ambition: a previously underrated cult favorite, with the ambition and resources to be, more or less, the new Caliphate, HBO’s former crown jewel of the mega-wealth tragedy.

The comparison is obvious, and inevitably exaggerated, though still apt: If Succession was, as claimed, the defining spectacle of Trump’s first presidency—a brilliantly distorted mirror of the times of toxic cartoons—then the industry seems true to the second, when everything somehow got worse. Kay and Dawn are too smart to get involved in American politics — Eric waving to a distant man in a red hat on a fancy golf course in the premiere is a bit too much — and they operate enough in the UK, basing an organizational chart on a Labor sweep in 2024. But its dark view of power, its operating logic based on relentless self-interest, sacrificing privacy and continuity for spectacle and scale, feels like a real moment. I’m still not sure how much I mean that as a compliment.

The final scene of the penultimate episode, at least, brings us back into familiar territory: Harper and Jasmine are at a bar together. Over the course of four seasons, their dynamic is volatile, tender, codependent, and above all, greedy. They’re a world away from the show ratings, sexual harassment, and men involved in the first season. They have betrayed each other so completely, so many times, that rapprochement has become impossible; However, they all have each other. He remains the only person they can be truly honest with, now against the backdrop of international scandal, financial collapse and potential ruin. “How the hell did we get here?” Yasmine says sadly. For a second she might also want to go back.