Industry

Created by Konrad Kay and Mickey Down, both former finance professionals turned writers, Industry has followed a group of new graduates into the fictional investment bank Pierpoint & Co since its first season, a world of impossible hours, cutthroat competition among colleagues and a corporate culture that rewards ruthlessness over competence. The core cast has remained stable across seasons, with Myha'la as Harper Stern and Marisa Abela as Yasmin Kara-Hanani, joined by Ken Leung, Kit Harington and Sagar Radia, while season four widens the story's scope beyond Pierpoint's walls, following Yasmin into a relationship with tech founder Henry Muck and Harper drawn into the orbit of the enigmatic executive Whitney Halberstram. That shift away from a single banking setting is the season's most significant change, one that lets the show extend its critical eye from traditional banking to the equally ruthless world of tech startups and alternative finance, without losing its surgical precision in depicting power, humiliation and financial dependency among its characters.

The style remains the one that made the show a cultural talking point: jittery editing, a meticulously curated soundtrack, and writing that grants no one a moral pass, portraying its characters with the same unsparing eye it turns on their environment. The comparison to Succession, invoked often in the early seasons, holds less with each passing year, since Industry has developed its own idiom, more physical and jittery, closer to the generation of its protagonists than to the media dynasty at the center of Jesse Armstrong's show. The acting has kept pace with the writing, and several cast members have gone on to notable roles outside the series without the ensemble losing its chemistry.

It's this fourth season, able to partially reinvent the show's formula without betraying it, that has put Industry back at the center of the critical conversation, drawing enthusiastic reviews and near-unanimous agreement that it now belongs among the best dramas on television.