“Industry” opens on a room of graduates who have already decided they will hurt each other. Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, both former investment bankers, built the HBO and BBC Two drama around Pierpoint & Co, a prestigious London investment bank where a handful of young hires compete for a limited set of permanent positions. The show premiered on 9 November 2020 on HBO and the next day on BBC Two. It ran four seasons and 32 episodes, ending 1 March 2026, and has been renewed for a fifth and final series. This is the rare workplace drama that treats the workplace as the whole moral universe, and it earns most of what it claims.
Trailer, via BBC.
Harper Stern and the Cross Product Sales desk
Myha’la plays Harper Stern, an underestimated, intelligent and talented young woman from Binghamton, New York, assigned to the Cross Product Sales desk. She is the show’s engine. Harper is not a hero and not an antihero in the usual television sense; she is a person who has decided that the only stable thing in her life is the desk, and who will trade almost anything to stay near it.
That choice sets the terms for everyone around her. Marisa Abela’s Yasmin Kara-Hanani arrives from a wealthy background and lands on the Foreign Exchange Sales desk, and the gap between her money and her ambition does most of the work in her early scenes. Ken Leung’s Eric Tao runs Cross Product Sales, described as the fiery managing director who takes Harper under his wing. The phrase is accurate and also a warning.
Robert Spearing, Gus Sackey and the graduate class
Harry Lawtey plays Robert Spearing, an Oxford graduate from a working-class Welsh background, also on the Cross Product Sales desk. David Jonsson plays Augustus “Gus” Sackey, an openly gay graduate of literae humaniores at Eton and Oxford, first on the Investment Banking Division desk and then Cross Product Sales.
The early seasons lean on the contrast between these three and the institution. Robert’s background is a fact the bank never lets him forget. Gus’s credentials are impeccable and still not enough to make him safe. Harper’s intelligence is the thing that gets her noticed and the thing that makes her dangerous to keep.
The supporting cast does not decorate the story; it defines the pressure. Freya Mavor plays Daria Greenock, a vice president on Cross Product Sales and Harper’s line manager. Conor MacNeill plays Kenny Kilbane, a vice president on the Foreign Exchange desk and Yasmin’s line manager. Sarah Parish plays Nicole Craig, a Pierpoint client who is sexually inappropriate with Harper and Robert. Nabhaan Rizwan plays Hari Dhar, a state-school graduate from an Urdu-speaking immigrant family on the Investment Banking Division desk.
The bank as the only setting that matters
The show’s own description is blunt about the culture: sex, drugs and ego count for as much as deals and dividends, and the lines between colleague, friend, lover and enemy blur fast. “Industry” does not soften that. It also does not treat it as shocking. The show’s real subject is how quickly a smart young person learns to call that normal.
Later series widen the frame. The narrative moves beyond Pierpoint to take in the wider UK financial sector and its governing bodies. That expansion is where the show grows up. A drama about graduates competing for permanent offers can only run so long before the offers are settled and the interesting question becomes what the survivors do with the power they now hold.
Kit Harington and the later installments
The ensemble shifts across the run, and the show is honest about it. Lawtey and Jonsson are leading players in earlier series. Sagar Radia and Kit Harington take on leading roles in later installments. The cast list reads less like a fixed company and more like a trading floor, where people leave and the desk keeps running.
That turnover is a feature. “Industry” has never pretended its graduates would stay graduates. The ones who remain become the managers, the clients and the problem.
What the show gets right about the work
The praise for “Industry” has centered on its writing, its performances, its direction and its portrayal of the banking sector. The third and fourth series drew the widest acclaim. That reputation is deserved on the evidence of the whole run, though not evenly.
The dialogue assumes the audience can keep up, and it mostly can. Deals are staged as arguments between people who each know they are right. The show understands that the drama of finance is not the money; it is the moment a person decides what they are willing to say to keep their seat.
The performances carry it. Myha’la keeps Harper watchable without making her likable, which is the harder job. Abela gives Yasmin a restlessness that never resolves into comfort. Leung plays Eric as a man whose temper is a management technique, and the show is smart enough to leave the question open.
Where the four seasons sit
The run breaks down cleanly enough:
- Series 1, 2020, eight episodes, the graduate intake at Pierpoint & Co.
- Series 2, 2022, eight episodes.
- Series 3, 2024, eight episodes, widely acclaimed.
- Series 4, 2026, eight episodes, widely acclaimed, ending 1 March 2026.
A fifth and final series is coming. That is the right call. “Industry” has spent four seasons building a world it can now close, and a show this controlled should get to choose its own ending rather than have one chosen for it.
The limits of the pitch
The premise is the weakest thing about “Industry,” and it is worth saying so plainly. A group of graduates competing for a limited set of permanent positions at a London investment bank is a setup that promises a contest, and contest stories have a shelf life. The show knows this, which is why it keeps widening its scope, but the widening costs something. The tighter the focus on the intake, the sharper the show. The broader it goes, the more it starts to resemble other dramas about institutions.
There is also a sameness to the vice. Sex, drugs and ego are real parts of this world, and the show uses them well, but after enough seasons the shock of a bad night stops landing. The best episodes are the ones where the damage is done in a meeting.
None of that undoes the achievement. “Industry” takes a subject most television treats as either glamorous or incomprehensible and makes it legible. It gives its young cast real work to do and never condescends to them. It casts a genuinely ensemble company — Myha’la, Abela, Leung, Lawtey, Jonsson, Radia, Harington — and lets the group carry the weight instead of one star.
The 7.5 out of 10 is the honest number. “Industry” is a serious, well-made drama with a strong voice and a clear point of view about work, class and ambition in London finance. It is not flawless. Its first season takes a while to find the shape it wants, and its later scope sometimes spreads the tension thinner than the early episodes managed. But the third and fourth series are the payoff, and the show has earned the right to end on its own terms.
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