Is ‘Industry’ Losing Its Edge?

Industry has always been a show with a lot of "too online" energy. A cocaine tornado of culturally in-vogue reference points, from Euphoria to Safdie brothers' movies to Tik Tok vids about finance bros. So it shouldn't be too surprising that, while the internet is conspiracymaxxing about Jeffrey Epstein and all his enablers and backers, the series' fourth season introduces a shadowy figure bent on financial domination, sexual manipulation, and extortion. After all, it was no accident that Epstein's own origins trace back to the world of Wall Street.

That said, I am worried that the show's maximalist ADHD mandate has finally caught up to it. It's hard to say a show that delights in jumping sharks has jumped the shark exactly, but it does seem like Industry may have bitten off more than it can chew, leading to an uneven season where the highs are kind of dulled for feeling rehashed and the lows are a lot harder to overlook.

The decision to move on from Pierpoint wasn't an altogether bad one, though the boiler-room intensity of having all the characters in the same room, not knowing whether they might kill each other or fuck (or both), was key to the excitement of the previous seasons. Following the characters out in the world has expanded the show's scope, but the result hasn't really been any more fulfilling and certainly isn't any more coherent. To return to the Epstein angle, Max Minghella is good at playing Whitney Halberstram, the supervillain tech finance bro, but the combination of his James Bond nemesis energy mixed with Patrick Bateman makes it feel as if the writers arrived at his character after playing a game of evil CEO bingo. Despite those flaws, I did sort of like him as the Epstein-like puppet master blackmailing everyone around him. But the reveal that, it turns out, Halberstram is just a patsy of even more shadowy forces borders on QAnon ridiculousness and boring writing.