Prepare for Industry to go into "proper thriller mode" in season 4

“The work is anti-status quo, anti-establishment, anti-power,” Eric Tao (Ken Leung) declares in Industry‘s fourth season, which premieres January 11. And every character in HBO’s scathing series craves and chases after power, no matter the cost. The hedonistic desire to move up in a high-stakes financial world has driven Harper Stern (Myha’la), Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela), Rishi Ramdani (Sagar Radia), and Eric for three seasons now. Their circumstances might have drastically changed in the show’s latest round, considering their original place of employment is gone, but they still go to extreme lengths to climb up the social hierarchy. As Yasmin claims in the upcoming batch of episodes, “Access changes people’s lives; it levels them up.” 

Yasmin took a major step in the season-three finale to achieve this by tying the knot with Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington) after suffering through a family scandal and public scrutiny. Facing their fair share of marital highs and lows, the couple joins forces in season four with a manipulative ally, Max Minghella’s Whitney Halberstram. He not only shakes up the game for Yasmin and Henry, but he also finds a way to entangle himself with Harper and Eric. Oh, yes, the former mentor-mentee duo is working together again, this time alongside Sweetpea Golightly (Miriam Petche) and trader Kwabena Bannerman (Toheeb Jimoh). Each one of them, as well as new characters played by Kiernan Shipka and Charlie Heaton, helps make Industry even more twisted this time around. 

Industry creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, who’ve been close friends since meeting at Oxford University, tell The A.V. Club they were excited to give the series a fresh start after writing themselves into a corner. The destruction of Pierpoint as we know it and the absence of Harry Lawtey‘s Robert Spearing allowed them to switch things up. The next big twist they saw for Industry is to turn it into a full-fledged capitalistic thriller, one that involves Harper possibly pairing with a fintech journalist—a move that could directly affect Yasmin’s latest career prospects. Down and Kay spoke with The A.V. Club about why their friendship remains the heart of the show and how new arrival Whitney could wreak havoc in season four. 

The A.V. Club:  Industry is the type of show where its characters are always stressed. What is it about the idea of pushing them to the very brink that you find fruitful as storytellers?

Konrad Kay: It was a happy accident in some ways because the velocity of the show was found in the cutting style during season one. We didn’t quite know what the show was and we didn’t really know whether we had the material to sustain ourselves. You’ll notice that over the seasons, our episode lengths went from 45 or 47 minutes to the full hour or more. In that cutting style, we found a certain velocity that worked for the show. It’s basic shit, but it’s true that the more obstacles you can throw at a character, the more compelling it is for us. So we always start episodes of Industry thinking about what the emergency is, why now, and what solutions we can provide that make the characters move through space and time in a way where they consistently want something. 

I know that’s really rudimentary, but that’s how we still approach it. Season three’s Rishi-centric episode is a really good example of that. It’s probably the peak of what you’re talking about, but it’s laden with character-driven moments. We had as many things to solve within an hour as humanly possible, and it allowed people to enjoy the fundamental practicality of watching the noose tighten around someone’s neck.

Mickey Down: It’s interesting to me to see how people behave when they’ve got a gun to their neck and when they’re pushing through a corner. Our characters have to feel like they’re in constant survival mode, as Konrad said. There’s always an obstacle to overcome or an obstacle they’ve been pushed into. In always finding an emergency, that’s when the show found its groove. And that’s not to say there are not quiet, intimate, self-reflective moments or bits of romance, but the show works really well when there’s a ticking clock and an urgency to the storytelling. All that made it quite easy to supplant Industry into a proper thriller mode for season four. The ingredients are already there since the characters usually act out of impulse and have a belief structure they’re trying to impose on others. Our characters are constantly fucking, sleep deprived, or high on drugs, so that helps it feel like they’re on the edge all the time. All of that has the makings of a good thriller, so it felt like a natural progression of the show at this time.

AVC: When you sat down to map out season four, what are the arcs or character moments you wanted to accomplish? And how does the thriller aspect help with that? 

KK: We also went into season four with a bit of a blank slate because of the way that we ended season three. So it was creatively challenging in a good way. We thought we could essentially do anything now. There is no Pierpoint, and we’re not beholden to any source material or IP. We thought we could do anything we want to do now. We have these great characters whom people have seen grow up. There’s a lot of buy-in from the audience who are rooting for their success because they’ve seen them in their nascent stages, like they’ve seen Yasmin get the salad orders, or at least they give a fuck about what happens next to them. 

MD: The show’s always been a reflection of what Konrad and I are interested in at the time. It started as this slice of life show about people working on the trading floor. But it’s evolved into this contemporary look at society and capitalism, which it wasn’t initially intended to be. But that’s just because both of us are interested in exploring that stuff about how money corrupts, how power corrupts, and how it mutates you. That is the central question of season four and of the show: Did people always have this operating system, or was it their environment that turned them into these people? This year, we’re bringing in new characters and we’re losing some old ones. But the beating heart of the show still really is the core relationship between Harper and Yasmin and their friendship and their path. It’s about what they will do for each other and what they will take from each other. It’s a transactional relationship, but is it calculating or does it actually come from a place of love? That’s continually what we’re asking of them: Do they love each other? 

AVC: Can you talk about the state of Yasmin and Henry’s marriage and why you wanted to give this relationship a sort of bottle episode early in the season? 

MD: It’s practically what catalyzes Henry’s story this season, and he learns what it is he needs to do to survive. It would’ve been an enormous risk to have that story as the very first episode, and it could’ve totally alienated audiences if we had started Industry season four and it was just Henry in a big house with Yasmin. It would’ve felt a bit too much like a fuck you. So we put that all in episode two. If you have the privilege of doing a full season at this point, you can take some risks that maybe you wouldn’t do early on. So this felt like a palate cleanser. Technically speaking, too, Konrad and I wanted to make sure we directed it. We were going to do the first two and the last two, so it had to be either of those blocks. 

AVC: Max Minghella’s Whitney plays a major part in Harper and Yasmin’s lives. How did you devise how their lives keep intertwining, even if they’re doing totally separate things? 

KK: It was a slow process and a geometric puzzle. It’s something we talked about in the writers’ room for ages. We have over 150 speaking parts in the new season. It really feels like a universe rather than the small show of the first three seasons, or the smaller show of the first three seasons, I should say. We had to talk about what we wanted the new faces to represent so that it’s consistently surprising, such that when the huge reveals happen around him or Hayley [Kiernan Shipka] later in the season, it feels organically embedded in. We’re also looking to cast good, egoless actors who are willing to not upset the dynamic of the show. We run a pretty enjoyable set where we work very hard but also have a good time. 

Max Minghella is a good example. He was like Kit Harington in that they came into the show very conscious of the fact that they didn’t wanna upset the dynamic. Max plays Whitney, who is quite an overwhelming presence, but there’s enough groundwork to explore what he does without betraying all of the stuff that has made the show. We have a small, pre-evangelical audience, and we were very conscious of the fact that people might be coming to season four thinking, “You know, these guys should have wrapped this up after three seasons.”  

Saloni Gajjar is The A.V. Club‘s TV critic. 

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