DUBAI: In its fourth season, now airing on OSN+, the acclaimed financial drama “Industry” switches lanes, evolving into an ambitious corporate thriller about money, power and the human condition.
Co-creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay — both former investment bankers — push back on the idea that “Industry” is simply about monsters in suits.
“The reductive view of the show is that all of the characters are sort of sociopaths,” Kay told Arab News. “I think that’s not entirely true. A certain kind of transactional relationship is bred into these people; some arrive with it fully formed, some of them don’t have it come naturally to them, and then are put into that situation, and then they see the human cost of it.”
Season four, he said, is “slightly darker,” following the “capitalist OS” as it bleeds into politics and media, but it also makes space for tenderness.
“The world can be quite cold, but at the edges there is this kind of innocence, this kind of romance, that could be transformative for a lot of them.”
Down is keen to stress that no one in “Industry” thinks of themselves as a villain.
“I don’t think anyone on Earth thinks of themselves (that way),” he said. “They’re constantly self-justifying. Their morality has become more complex. They know that some of the things they’re doing are wrong. Characters are behaving in ways that they think will lead to their survival, but there’s a lot more self-awareness.”
Season four finds Myha’la Herrold’s Harper Stern and Marisa Abela’s Yasmin Kara-Hanani — the show’s central characters — at both their most ruthless and most vulnerable.
Now that Pierpoint, the London investment bank that defined the series’ early identity, is gone, both are operating with new levels of power.
“She’s using the survival skills we’ve seen her accumulate over the last three seasons,” said Abela, pointing to the trauma of Yasmin’s father’s death as a hardening force.
The emotional connection between Harper and Yasmin remains the show’s beating heart. Abela describes them as fighting on opposite sides of a battle, bound by shared trauma and an almost compulsive need to let the other see them at their most exposed. Yasmin, she notes, often invites Harper in at her lowest points precisely because she knows Harper will confront her with uncomfortable honesty.
Asked about their favorite moments from season four, Abela selected a Christmas-themed episode centered on Yasmin’s faltering marriage to Henry (played by “Game of Thrones” star Kit Harington – that gives her “a clear, emotionally charged objective.”
Herrold picked the entire latter half of the season, when she and Abela are back in each other’s orbit. “I missed her a lot, so when we were finally back together… that’s always a highlight for me,” she said.
Harington shed some light on his working relationship with the creators. Arriving on the show after a decade-long run on “Game of Thrones,” he was used to older showrunners. On “Industry,” he said, “they’re actually younger than me, which is bizarre.”
Still, he said, they share a key trait with his ‘Thrones’ bosses David Benioff and D.B. Weiss: “They orchestrate everything in a way which encourages everybody to make the best thing,” while remaining “the sun that everyone orbits around.”
Its creators see “Industry” as a kind of Russian doll: from trading floor to global politics to tech and media. But they insist it remains a character study, particularly of Harper and Yasmin’s “pathological friendship.”
Season four leans hard into mystery and thriller territory, drawing on films like “Michael Clayton” and “The Insider.”
“We wanted to Trojan-horse what we’re interested in into ‘Industry,’” said Kay. “A thriller engine allows you to have speed and velocity without shirking the complexity. It’s still ‘Industry’ — all the characterization that we’re hopefully good at by now — tacked onto a plot mechanism that we haven’t done before.”
For all the genre trappings, Down says what matters is that the characters end up somewhere seismic and unsettling.
“Ultimately, there are no clean wins in this show. Everything is some kind of compromise. That makes it stop feeling procedural and makes it feel gnarly and real.”
