Industry review: Heartless and bleak, this murky London banking drama is no Succession

The talk among television connoisseurs is that Industry (BBC One, Tuesday) is the new Succession. Superficially, the parallels are certainly striking. The BBC-HBO co-production chronicles the back-stabbing goings-on at a London investment bank full of nasty people being horrible to one another – a milieu once removed from that of Succession (in which the scions of a New York media empire plotted each other’s downfall).
Just like Succession, Industry has also taken its time finding its audience. Series one and two went largely below the radar, but as it crosses the Atlantic for a third season (having debuted on HBO in early August), the sense is that a brutally dark and sometimes funny drama is about to have its moment. Ring the Wall Street bell, unleash the confetti – the binge-watch gods have blessed us again.
But is it as good as the chatter would have you believe? Succession was groundbreaking in that it forensically exposed the agonies of the mega-rich – and made the rest of us feel better about being skint strivers. But in Industry, which tracks a team of ethically bankrupt traders at fictional Pierpoint and Co, the less original message is that high finance is a cesspit populated by overworked, over-medicated, over-sexed monsters. To which the obvious reply is: tell us something we didn’t know.
If it resembles anything in spirit it is Game of Thrones – another celebration of medieval cruelty and arcane beliefs (faith in mystical gods vs devotion to tooth and claw capitalism). The latest series even features Jon Snow himself, aka Kit Harington, as the head on a greenwashing clean energy company which is about to go public and has hired Pierpoint to handle the flotation.
The problem is that the corporation, Lumi, is wildly overvalued, and Harington’s despicable Sir Henry Muck is determined to shift as much stock as possible before word gets out. That’s just one problem confronting Pierpoint’s resident poor little rich girl, Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela, last seen playing Amy Winehouse in Back to Black).
The other biggie on her plate is that her publishing mogul father has apparently done a runner following an incident (details as yet unrevealed) on a yacht off the south of France. Hounded by the tabloids, haunted by the sight of her father in flagrante below deck (the disturbance that triggers his disappearance) it’s all coming at Yasmin, who fears she is for the sack.
Her concerns are justified. Her needy boss, Eric (Ken Leung), has been warned he must display an improved capacity for cruelty if he wishes to remain as a partner at Pierpoint. He flirts with binning Yasmin but instead sacks Irishman Kenny, (whom he mockingly refers to as Wolfe Tone). The crime Kenny (Conor MacNeill) has committed is kindness – when Eric’s wife turfed him out, it was Kenny who took Eric in. In Eric’s eyes, that is confirmation that Kenny is a nice guy – and in a bear pit such as Pierpoint, he has to go.
The script, by former investment bankers Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, moves quickly, but it’s all so heartless and bleak. Even more so than Succession, there is nobody for whom to root. If only they could all lose. Watching these feral financiers rip each other’s throats out makes for an engaging blood sport – yet beyond the performative viciousness, it’s unclear if there’s much else going on with Industry. The search for Succession’s successor continues.