Started from the bottom

now we're here

Characters should hit rock bottom at some point. In the storytelling we are used to, characters are often dragged along a parabolic train ride; they go up, go all the way down, then build themselves up again and end either at a place of peace/stasis or a place of flames/destruction. Rarely do stories start with characters at rock bottom, although sometimes characters may think that’s where they are (such as in Breaking Bad), and rarely do stories end with their characters at the top (maybe in romance novels). Industry is a rare exception, starting its characters at absolute rock bottom and mostly keeping them there throughout the first season. Its nihilistic and humorless treatment of humanity initially turned me all the way off. But there’s something brewing in that writers’ room that’s made season two hard to ignore.

The industry in question is the financial industry in London and the series is not missnamed- the industry these characters work in rules their lives. The series opens by focusing on a character who is so driven to work harder and longer than all his first-year colleagues that he stops leaving work and accidentally takes enough amphetamines to kill himself. His surviving colleagues, Harper, Yasmin, Gus, and Robert are the main focus of the show. Each character is beginning a new chapter of their lives; they are first-year associates at Pierpoint & Co., one of London’s top investment banks. Each has strived for this opportunity in their own way: Harper has lied about her college transcripts, Yasmin has a very rich father, Gus has come through Eton and Oxford as a Black Gay man with immigrant parents, and Robert has come through Oxford with a working-class background and accent to match. Although the opportunities for clawing one’s way to the top are there, each of our characters has, by accepting this job, condemned themselves to a narrative rock bottom. It’s all unsatisfying sex, coke bumps, professional humiliation, and incredible stress from here on out.

And for all of season one, it really is. No one is ever happy or truly satisfied; Harper’s highest moment of the season is when she makes enough money to rent a luxury hotel room for one night and just stare at the London skyline alone. There is no intimacy in this show, although there’s plenty of brutally graphic sex. There is no fellow feeling, no trust, or camaraderie between our characters. The end of season one sees one character deciding to opt out of the industry entirely and we can only applaud him for seeing what the others cannot; there will never be any authentic joy in this world. Harper ends the season by getting a woman attempting to reform the company culture fired in order to secure her own position; Yasmin is hired as a full-time employee because she agrees to be a “team player” and not report her boss for sexual harassment; Gus quits; Robert convinces the company to keep him on because he’s a lad’s lad and the clients will like him.

Where does a show go from here? Industry has kept its characters mired in such a depressing hole for so long; is it possible to maintain a consistent tone and yet move them beyond their rock bottoms? I’ve noticed a trend in a lot of prestige dramas recently where the best possible outcome you could hope for the characters is that they all leave the show. Succession and its Montana doppelganger Yellowstone are two obvious examples of this phenomenon. In both shows, every character would be happier, more fulfilled, and more likely to live out a natural lifespan if they’d just leave. They have the money and the means, but their personal demons compel them to stay. Gus is the most literal manifestation of this, and the show has struggled to know what to do with him after he quit Pierpoint, but I applaud it for allowing a character to take the only path that made sense and leave the industry.

I had no intention of watching season two of Industry because I genuinely thought they had written themselves into a corner. Most of the main characters were morally compromised, enmeshed within a corrupt system, and overwhelmingly likely to remain so. Such is the case with Succession, too, but that show is a Shakespearean unicorn that somehow manages to be wildly funny even as it twists the knife. Industry is not a funny show. But, in season two, they’ve proved that they have not written anyone into a corner (maybe Gus), in fact, they’ve raised the quality tenfold.

Season two of Industry is different in one important sense: time has passed. Harper and her colleagues are in their third year at Pierpoint and the pandemic has wrought subtle changes in their world. The new class of first-years is less enamored of the workaholic culture and are sometimes successful in their attempts to push back. Harper has been working from a hotel for far too long and has to find a way to integrate back into the office; Yas is looking for a change and flirting with the private wealth management part of Pierpoint; the show has no clue what to do with Gus; Robert is out of his toxic relationship with Yas and attempting to build his own book of business. There’s a new player in the game, a very rich and difficult man named Jesse Bloom (Jay Duplass) who Harper lands as a client, then has to manage. And somehow, there’s a sense less of four people being dragged through a narrative parabola of highs and lows, and more of a sense of voluntary movement. Dare I say our characters have… grown? And grown in our very absence? Reader, they have. Where season one was an endless slog of a journey up and down the Sisyphean hill, season two is more akin to reading Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus. Our characters are confronted with the same choices and opportunities to make the same mistakes this season, but there’s a bit of a sidestep, a memory of the hot stove that stops Robert from sleeping with Yas, that drives Harper to betray her toxic boss. We’re on the same terrible journey up and down that same hill, but our characters know now that within the confines of their world, choices do exist if they have the strength to find them and make them. That’s a show I want to keep watching.