Industry Season 4: When Power Replaces Innocence in Modern Finance
It may be only January, but Industry Season 4 already feels like one of those rare television moments that defines an entire year. Not because it is louder or flashier than before, but because it finally understands the true cost of ambition. What began in 2020 as a worm’s-eye view of young graduates clawing for survival inside London banking has now evolved into something far darker, more expansive, and far more honest.
Earlier seasons were about entry-level fear: botched orders, humiliations, sex as currency, and the intoxicating illusion of having “made it.” Season 4 strips away that illusion entirely. These characters now have power—and the show is no longer interested in sparing them from its consequences.
The destruction of Pierpoint at the end of Season 3 was not shock value; it was a deliberate creative reset. Co-creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay essentially scorched the earth, freeing the story from the trading floor and allowing it to interrogate the systems that sit above finance: politics, tech, media, and moral compromise. The result is a season that feels less like workplace drama and more like a financial conspiracy thriller.
At the centre of this shift is Tender, a fintech payment processor on the verge of becoming a “bank killer.” Its desire to cut ties with an OnlyFans-style platform amid looming UK online safety legislation grounds the series firmly in real-world headlines. This is Industry at its smartest—using contemporary regulation debates to expose how quickly ethics vanish when growth is at stake.
Harper Stern (Myha’la), now running a short-selling fund under billionaire Otto Mostyn, embodies this moral tension. She remains razor-sharp, perpetually cornered, and painfully self-aware. Her anger—called out bluntly by mentor-turned-mirror Eric Tao—is not softened for audience comfort. Instead, it becomes a weapon, and a warning. Power does not liberate Harper; it merely gives her sharper tools to hurt and be hurt.
Meanwhile, Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) has traded corporate ambition for aristocratic suffocation, married to Henry Muck (a career-best Kit Harington). Henry’s failed green-energy empire and Yasmin’s unsettling social ascent echo real-world elites who survive scandal by simply moving rooms. Their storyline flirts openly with class rot, privilege, and moral immunity.
The expanded cast—Max Minghella’s eerily bloodless fintech founder, Kiernan Shipka’s calculating insider, Toheeb Jimoh’s quietly brilliant Kwabena—fits seamlessly into this more operatic world. Even the show’s obsession with fashion becomes narrative language: clothes operate as passports, signalling who belongs, who pretends, and who never truly will.
What ultimately makes Season 4 land is its refusal to offer comfort. Death looms. Consequences linger. Desire curdles into obsession. The 80s-leaning soundtrack feels intentional, reminding us that this decay is not new—it is inherited.
Industry no longer asks whether ambition corrupts. It assumes corruption is inevitable, and asks a far more unsettling question instead: what happens when the people we once pitied become the architects of the damage?
Season 4 doesn’t just raise the stakes. It exposes the system—and dares the audience to keep watching anyway.
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