Industry

genophysia and Angela Kinsey, for all insider stories from the office, and a podcast family, you'll love to be a part of. Find office ladies, everywhere you get your podcasts. So if you've been keeping up with HBO's addictive drama industry,

you know it's never been afraid to weed in the muck.

Financial muck, ethical muck, a man child aristocrat, aptly named Sir Henry muck. The most recent season was especially messy as the past of friend Amiz Harper and Yasmin radically converged and diverged, and the sorted parallels to real life headlines became pretty much impossible not to notice. So after that heroine finale, we're taking it all in

“and wondering, what just happened and where might the show go from here?”

I'm Alicia Harris and today we're talking about industry, unpoppled your half-hour from NPR. This message comes from the BBC, with its new podcast, The Interface.

Every Thursday, three leading tech journalists explore how tech is rewiring your week

and your world. Listen to the interface on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Joining me today is Whalen Wong, she's the co-host of NPR's Daily Economics Podcast, the Indicator from Planet Money. Hello, Whalen, welcome back. Hello, there's a whole of my bucket, Alicia. Oh, yes, all the buckets. All the buckets. Oh, there's a whole of my bucket. Also with us is Sam Yellowhorse Kessler, a producer for NPR's Planet Money.

Hello to you, Sam. Welcome back. Hey, Alicia. It's great to have you both. So here's where we are at with season 4 of industry. Harper Stern partnered with her old boss and mentor Eric Tau on an up-start investment firm that are played by Mahala and Ken Leon.

Why are you being so sharp with me? Because this is not some recreational

game or some lame extension of your retirement while you're floating around trying to rehab your life or, I don't know, cause playing the roles that you have spent your life ignoring.

“When the **** did I ever say I wanted it to be recreational? Do they really curse that much on the show?”

Oh, yes, they do. They absolutely do curse that much. Marie Sallebello plays Yasmin, she settled into life with Sir Henry Muck, the tech aristocrat played by Kit Harrington. Henry's daddy issues in drug addiction among many other things quickly began to take a toll on their marriage. Please, Henry, please put your big boy clothes on, go downstairs and just try face our poppinick. Henry, we'll get into that. Now, simultaneously they merge their

business interests. She managed to land Henry a CEO role at a FinTech startup called Tender and also get herself a job at a TED a communications. I keep on and I call Tender Tender. I know it's not, but that name. So every season, Tender bring at least one new big bat into the fold in ultra villain among a CEO villains. And this time it was Whitney Halberstrom, the CFO and co-founder of Tender who was slowly revealed to have exactly zero scruples of any kind. He's

played by Max Mangala. And Harper and Eric uncovered some damming evidence about Tender and left at an opportunity to expose it and cash in complicating Harper's relationship with Yasmin. This of course led to some pretty devastating consequences for everyone. Okay, industry streaming on HBO Max and so much happened this season. So let's just get right into it. Wayland, I'm going to start with you. How are we feeling about where we are at now? This season

was a very different beast from the previous three seasons. Every season, it kind of morphs into

“something different. But this felt like a reset in the way. I think in fact, the creator is Mickey”

down and Conrad Kay have talked about it as a reset. So did this reset work for you? Did it feel fresh? Yeah, this is like the fast five of industry. I love that reference. You know, I really respect the big swing they took in this reset. You know, they really brought it out the world, right? And so instead of being in this very insular world of finance or the trading floor, you know, they blew it wide open. And this season was kind of this, you know, talented Mr. Ripley

meets Michael Clayton kind of paranoid conspiracy thriller. And so I do very much appreciate the ambition. I think as I'm processing this season, I'm realizing that this more expansive world is not my favorite flavor of industry. I think I do prefer something a little smaller. I think it makes it more unique in that way when they stick to kind of the bread and butter finance stuff. Yeah. So not all of the world broadening worked for me, but a lot of it did. I still had a ton of fun.

outer space or wherever we go next if we're using the fast and furious model here. I mean, I just really have a lot of fun with the show. Yeah, outer space, the frozen tundra, like the nose, and it's good. That's forever belongs. Yeah. Oh, in a car with you, the crass and outer space. I don't know about Harper, but maybe yes. Well, that's where Eric Tau was walking.

You never stopped. You just kept going north. He's still walking.

“Still walking. So Sam, how about you? How are you feeling about this reset as it were?”

Okay. So the question is, does the reset work or do I miss what industry used to be? And I think my answer is both and. Oh, oh, oh, my best. The thing of the season is that we're blown up the form. I wear outside of the bank. We're off the trading floor and everyone's kind of fending for themselves. I am a little bit sad. Like every season, I get a little bit more sad that we have lost that kind of core four of Gus Rob Harper and Yasmeen. But I think finagling that to turn to

Yasmeen and Harper is probably the right move. They made a lot of really good decisions this season to kind of ramp up the stakes. I take points away because it's a, it became something of like a predictable show. You know, sometimes like overly dramatic and the characters are very lived in. I didn't feel like there was any kind of like massive twists or turns along the way,

but it also doesn't feel cheap. It feels very real and it's always incredibly entertaining to

watch play out. The characters are just incredibly entertaining to watch in how predictable they are

“in their flaws. You know, some of the lows that they sank to. I think I sit somewhere where you”

both are living and that there were so many things that I loved about this and I do feel like the reset helped it feel different from the previous seasons, even though a lot of the same themes were being talked about. I really enjoyed how this show has sort of every season. As I've already mentioned, brings in its new kind of big bad and you know, in previous seasons, it was Jesse Bloom, the character played by Jay-Doo Plus, who was the hedge fund manager, who Harper was working with

as a client when she was still at peer point. We also had like other figures and I think that to

expand beyond this like one financial institution and to show how it's incorporated in and compromise with every other level of like the world of the economy. So you have the media aspect of it. You have the billionaire class part of it and the political part of it and you know, I'm not going to sit here and pretend I know much if anything about British politics but I did find it interesting to see the way that whole idea of follow the money. The money goes everywhere and everyone

“is compromise and I really like that. I think where it fell short for me and maybe we can talk a”

little bit more about this is sort of this Henry Muck situation here which began in season three and then this season I know there were a lot of people who praised the episode that was kind of contained where it was just about him kind of on the precipice of his 40th birthday and with his ghost dad and stuff. Yes, with his ghost dad. That was a ghost the whole time. Oh my god that changes everything. Yeah wait are you being serious or do you know? I don't know. I know when Sam's mind

over here. I didn't want to assume in the way it's it's shot very co-brooky and it actually kind of reminded me a little bit and I think this was intentional there's the song that's playing which is their Lyndon. Well love Barry Lyndon but also a clockwork orange right because they're playing music for the funeral of Queen Mary and that's a version of that appears in a clockwork orange and like as soon as I heard I was like what do I remember to strum oh it's a clockwork orange and

I understand what they're trying to do here but also we already know Henry is he just seems like the character who I didn't learn that much about that I wouldn't expect and I think that goes to your point Sam about like it did feel as though the Henry character was kind of stuck in a loop but also we brought in so many new characters and I'm curious what you thought about so of these new characters especially Whitney Halberstrom but also characters like the Kieran and Shipka

character who she is playing Haley who they they call Calabassus in a kind of condescending way and she's playing sort of what we she's revealed to be a sex worker escort who has been brought into the tender world you know how do we feel about these new characters that were added in this is a really interesting question because earlier I yesterday you said that this is an introduced a new big bad and that you know a big bad of season's past was Jesse Bloom this hedge fund manager

and it's almost like what is your definition of a big bad right and what I really liked about industry and the Jesse Bloom season was that like he's Jesse Bloom like like a bad guy is he like

profit he happened to make a ton of money off of like betting on COVID which feels gross and it fits

into this gray area that finance inhabits of like profiting off of often you know like misfortune and kind of like bad things happening to humanity now in season four your big bad is Whitney who is the sociopath with very little kind of ambiguity or almost like nuanced leg from the jump and then it turns out the big big bad is ferdinand who works at tender and they're connected to the crumlin and it feels like too conventional in some ways you know and also there are Nazis let's

not forget they're enough and they were not too and so I kind of prefer the morally gray big bad so to speak where you could even you could even put Harper and Jasmine in that category like

is everyone like a medium bad a small to medium bad you know and that is to me a more interesting

“space to play in and I think the fact that like Henry Muck who is also like a medium bad and that”

he is like super privileged and has not spent a lot of time questioning his class privilege and is like really messed up in lots of ways you know the way he just cuts kind of get to snared with this like whole Russian plot feels you know maybe less compelling than if something else had happened to him vis-a-vis Whitney you know yeah I think they did right they made the very choice to kind of focus on these people who are more slightly in the gray area rather than the outright

Nazis even Max I was interested to hear you say like that he was somewhat sinister because definitely

from the beginning I guess I didn't really know where to place him and there was more of a sensation

that he might just be as amoral as everyone else but not outright psychopathic and they do have an episode with him and Kit Harrington's character where they kind of flesh out this like strange codependency I like that it felt like an episode of um I love dick where he's like writing him all these letters and like kind of showing that he's not just like he's not unfeeling like he's not he's not a true that's like a path in the true sense but he does have a very complex kind of a

relationship with Henry Muck I like that kind of like dance that they have going between them where

“you're not sure exactly how far it's going behind the scenes I think I wanted more of that do you know”

name mean I feel like they made this turn where it was like oh Whitney is doing all this creepy stuff to Henry and I wish they had maybe had a little bit more like cat and mouse where oh now you think maybe Henry's play Whitney or like you're not quite sure where these men stand with each other instead you get you know Whitney caring bouquet flowers walking in on Henry in the shower when he's singing Gilbert and Sullivan I wanted more of that like single-white female stuff going on too like

it did really feel like this season was playing with a lot of different genres like wait when you already mentioned sort of the Michael Clayton and the sort of intrigue in that way and then you also have occasionally kind of like a stalkery thriller thing I also just like could not help but notice that you know this was a season where not to say that so Conrad Kay and Mickey down the creators have very obviously and directly referenced various things

from real life right they've talked about this in interviews as of this taping the creators have an acknowledge that they drew inspiration from Jeffrey Epstein or Gillin Maxwell but Marisa Abella who plays Yasmin has acknowledged their parallels between her character and Maxwell in an interview she did with our pal Roxanna Hadadi over at Bulcher but I noticed in season three that the whole subplot with Yas and her father Charles who was played by Adam Levy where you know

they have that mystery around his death off the yacht but that whole thing felt very similar to the way Gillin Maxwell's father died he died presumably off of a yacht as well and so I was like this is interesting I was down down to the name of the yacht oh right yes yes yes what was it even

“I don't remember what the yacht in industry's named Lady Yasmin and in real life the yacht was”

Lady and then one of the daughters okay right so again you can see the parallels and then of course by the end of this season season four we see that Yas has kind of become very similar to what we know about Gillin Maxwell and of course this is Gillin Maxwell who was a co-conspirator along with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and who was currently serving a 20 year prison sentence for sex trafficking and we see that she's Yas has been going back and forth on this and as starts off

like a Paul that knowing that her father paid off women and made them signed NDAs for for inappropriate relationships with his employees and now she has just gone full the other direction and is working

it's both like I appreciate these details and at the same time I wonder how much of this do I

want to see continue into season five because it's so bleak and not that the show was never not bleak

but it does feel as though I wonder like what the end of the road will be for yes and and like

“where can we possibly go from here like she's kind of completed her villain arc I think whereas with”

like Harper I'm a little bit more curious to see where she goes from here especially without area yeah I feel like the show to me especially the season is strongest when it's looking at the Harper Yas been relationship which you know is all over the place it's up it's down they're working at cross purposes they're teeming up they love each other they hate each other I find it really compelling that relationship and the way they talk to each other is really honest it's honest in

a way that they are never that honest with their romantic partners you know so it's kind of like

this is like the greatest romance in each of their lives is this like this friendship between them so I feel like for me it is also really hard to stomach the Yasman arc the way it ends at this end of the season and I am clinging to that scene we get in the other episode where Yasman and Harper go out they're like let's just go out and then they have this like really fun night on the

“town and and just like sitting smoking a cigarette contentedly with each other and I think that's”

girlhood you know even though I don't know anything like that my girlhood but um like nothing's gonna change this and I so I'm clinging to that I'm like I'm hoping that wasn't some kind of

valid victory that will look back on with you know grief that that never happened again I'm hoping

they get back to some version of that and I feel like Harper's kind of moral stand at the end of this season will be something that kind of gets picked up on as a threat next season and maybe she'll be the one to lead Yasman out of this dark place yeah it does feel like they're doing a thing that like Fleabag did where over time it kind of whittles down to like what the core relationship of the show is and it seems that they've decided that that's Harper and Yasman yeah I mean

I understand and I think to some extent that yes the Yasman Harper relationship is maybe the core heart of it but I still I have to pour it out for her relationship Harper's relationship with

“Eric because I mean it's not clear whether or not Eric might come back I think you know since”

that episode aired you know they've been very coy about whether or not Ken Leong is gonna come back but I just love the dynamic of the relationship and the fact that like it ain't never got sexual as far as I can remember like there was never any like willier won't they it always had more of a like father daughter or just like straight up mentor mentee situation and I so grateful when shows are able to do that because they're both outsiders right

they're both Americans in this world they're both people of color I think the fact that like we don't really know too much about certain characters except what we need to know and I think this season was really about Eric and Harper Eric trying to get closer to Harper because he's realizing he's lost any chance real chance with his own daughters and he's just like okay now I'm gonna throw this on to you and Harper's like no I'm not gonna do that and

seen when she reveals that she just found out her mother died was like one of the best things I've seen on this show and on any show my mom died my brother called me from New York yesterday to say there'd been an accident she just went overnight Christ I'm sorry you can talk about it to me that's the point like I don't know what to say I don't even know how to feel I love that and I think if it doesn't continue in this season five in any way that is something I'm gonna miss

you know I will miss that too I wanted to say on the character of Eric and on Ken Leong's performance like to me Eric Tao is the most complex interesting Asian American man I have ever seen on television I have never seen an Asian American male character like this I mean I can't think of any other example I think he's so singular he's so well written and layered and interesting and I do really love the theme that you picked up on Iisha this idea of Eric and Harper being

kind of this like surrogate father daughter duo who are both Americans navigating their way through a very nuanced class system an system of old and new money in the UK I feel like that was like a huge theme of this season and has been a throughline throughout the whole show and I was thinking about how you see a glimpse of Eric's teenage daughter the one that gets kicked out of boarding school and I remember when you see her talk she speaks with a British accent and I thought to myself

into the upper ranks of British society as far as you can go without being in the British

period you know as far as an American can go in that world then it's kind of like he did it because his daughter is a British accent you know but he doesn't have a relationship with that daughter and I thought that was really poignant yeah I was also thinking about how Robert and Gus they escaped this evil world by coming to Silicon Valley like these two breaths getting it up coming to the US and then they're portrayed as kind of having gotten their happy endings in the US in Silicon Valley

and I'm like this shows like doing some really interesting stuff about like the interplay between America and the UK and when it means that money and class status yeah of course we should be clear that like Robert and Gus were from the previous seasons Gus was played by David Johnson and Robert was played by Harry Laughty they started out with Harper and he has as sort of the

“upstarts at peer point and I think what the show knows how to do well is sort of like let characters”

leave I mean obviously I'm sure they're scheduling things and all that stuff like production things that we don't even know about but it also seems to understand that once a character has started as purpose or once they're no longer integral to the plot they can just leave and it's fine and we hear a little bit if you listen closely we might learn about what's happened to them from other characters talking about it but I just think it's really interesting and it's interesting

to see that we also brought in you know I do want to really briefly talk about you know this sweet pea and I love her. Robin uh. What's up what? Quabin, I played by Tahoe Jimmo and sweet pea is played by Miriam Pachie and they're kind of like the underlings of the stern tau little upstart firm and they are the ones who actually go out and get most of the evidence you know and I found that really interesting. Yeah they do more shoe leather reporting than Jim Diker be sure to listen actually does.

I didn't get a chance to be fair. Yeah no he would have made it though he was really rough.

“I don't know I don't know if then Digest had a travel budget for him so that's why I'd get”

in everything that happened. Oh poor Jim Diker Charlie. Who I was like is this Harry Styles? I'm sure he gets it all the time but I really thought it was Harry Styles. They look so much like yeah that whole cell plot was also really fascinating to me because again it's bringing in the media aspect of of the way all this works and given how the real world we've seen how journalists can kind of get themselves embedded into things and ways that are not quite ethical and he certainly does and

yeah just the way that it all intersects it's just overall I really enjoyed this this season I think. I think there were also doing a thing this season where it's like Henry you actually see him with a pretty happy ending right he's on this robot you know catching fish with his uncle and all seems right in the world he's protected he's back and his little cocoon. Henry gets like you know

what is basically the best possible ending he's not an orange jumpsuit he's not dead you know

and I feel like it's the show saying that like if you come from a certain social class and you have a certain status you still prevail in this way whereas Richie had all this money who married into a white upper class family in Britain was not able to hang on to any of that and in fact

“was given like a terrible, terrible ending you know so I think it's a very bleak read of what you know”

upper mobility and what you're able to do. I mean Henry does have that moment with Whitney where he is like I'm not going to be like you I'm going to lean back on my class. He said I would rather die as me than run as you or something which is something that's exactly what he does and

he turns out he made this like literally the the best choice in the show so far. He's only his first

good choice. Yes yes all the luck is is coming coming up well for him. I do think Harper to some extent is sort of the opposite where you know she's obviously coming from really really nothing and having Victor transcripts and she's still somehow being a black woman able to come out on top she is so resilient in ways that are that boggle my mind but also I'm just like I'm here for it I am seeing a black woman Betty. I think there's a master compartmentalizer. Oh yes yes as we know

because of her mommy issues and her brother issues and all those things that they only hint at. I did like when she says to Klobina you're like the only other black person I know and hang out with here. You know like there's really nothing to the relationship. It's nice to have you around. It's very real. I get it. I get it. I've I've been in the situations before. Well

we didn't even get to talk about the I want to dance with somebody. Oh my god.

“I'm so creepy. I'll just call you when we get off of this and then I'll just sing that to you”

in a creepy whispery voice. I love it. That's my ASMR right then and that brings us to the

end of our show. Wailing Wong Sam Yellow Horse Caseler. Thanks so much for being here. This was

“so fun. Thanks so much. Thank you for season five. Thank you. Season five baby.”

Season five. Last in and maybe the best. Who knows? Five seasons in a movie.

This episode was produced by Mike Katso, the Finn Liz Metzker, an edited by our showrunner,

“Jessica Riti. Hello, come in provides our theme music. Thanks so much for listening to”

pop put your happy hour from NPR. I'm Aisha Harris and we'll see you all next time.