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dankusner · 2 months

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How “Industry” Made Prestige TV for the TikTok Era

In the first episode of the third season of “Industry,” which premières this weekend on Max, a new character is introduced to the show’s ensemble.

“Industry” focusses on the British office of a fictional investment bank called Pierpoint; the wide-open trading floor, crammed with desks and Bloomberg terminals, is the center of the action.

The newcomer is a young woman named Sweetpea Golightly, played by Miriam Petche, who stands in the middle of the floor filming herself with her iPhone.

“So this is a morning in the life of a sales and trading graduate,” she says to her social-media followers.

“Shout-out to all my corporate girlies!”

She’s approached by Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela), a slightly more senior Pierpoint employee and one of the show’s protagonists, who incredulously tells Sweetpea that she can’t film there.

But Sweetpea is doing her job, in more than one sense of the word—she’s working as a bank employee and also performing as one online.

It’s an early signal that the show is of and for the TikTok era, a time when the hustle is not just corporate.

Later, it emerges that Sweetpea also runs an OnlyFans account: she has no compunction about commodifying herself in the same way as any of Pierpoint’s financial products.

“Industry” is something of a cult hit.

It premièred in late 2020 and was polarizing; its barrage of ringing phones and finance-speak was both transportive and alienating, a jittery throwback to a world of crowded offices.

But the show is now set to achieve a new level of fame, as its third season takes the heralded Sunday 9 P.M. slot on HBO, the one once occupied by “Game of Thrones” and “Succession.”

Kit Harington, better known as Jon Snow, of “Thrones,” even guest-stars this season as Henry Muck, the chaotic, upper-crust founder of a green-energy startup.

The show is poised as the inheritor of the prestige-TV mantle, but it doesn’t quite look or act like what we’ve come to expect from the genre.

Watching it is something like scrolling through thirty-second clips of “Mad Men” out of order on TikTok, or watching “Succession” on 2X speed.

I mean that mostly as a compliment.

“Industry” ’s first two seasons were headlong experiments in character, pacing, subplot, and audiovisual stimuli, sometimes extreme to the point of incomprehensibility.

The third titrates the formula perfectly; as if to simulate the characters’ habitual bumps of coke and ketamine, the plot jolts forward and shudders to a halt, to maximize the drama.

It’s like the opposite of A.S.M.R., an indulgence for the Internet-torched attention span, offering stimulus at every turn.

“I haven’t done blow since 9/11!” Eric Tao (Ken Leung), the featured Pierpoint team’s Machiavellian boss and problematic mentor, says in one of the season’s best one-liners, an art form that “Industry” has perfected.

“Industry” is fundamentally about a “young person in a work environment,” Mickey Down, the series’ British millennial co-creator, alongside Konrad Kay, told me.

(The two both briefly worked in finance.)

In the third season, the once fresh-faced interns are hard-bitten staff members, facing more challenges outside of the office than within it.

The American enfant terrible Harper Stern, played by Myha’la, has been ejected from Pierpoint but scrambles into a seemingly ethical investment fund focussed on the corporate buzzword E.S.G. (“environmental, social, and governance”).

Yasmin’s wealthy, abusive father has disappeared, along with much of the family fortune, attracting the attention of paparazzi and gossip papers.

Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey), not particularly good at his job, casts about for a deeper purpose and identity, and yearns for Yasmin to return his affections.

All the while, a new generation comes up under this group, even more brazen with their ambitions.

Kay characterized the Gen Z attitude toward both work and social media as “How quickly can you pay me to be who I am?”

Down added, “I don’t think the show would work in the millennial context, because too many people are apologizing for the fact that they want to be successful.”

The Pierpont crew doesn’t want to dismantle capitalism; they feel owed its fruits.

Petche emphasized that her character, Sweetpea, “wants to be seen doing very well.”

She continued, “It’s not quiet luxury; it’s more loud luxury.”

Where “Succession” cultivated a vogue for the richly understated, wealth as material and psychological insulation, “Industry” runs on sensory excess and blatant striving.

Ethics are both unaffordable and an unthinkable burden in the face of rampant competition.

No one in “Industry” is ever safe.

Kay said that the creators’ credo for the third season was “How many minutes of TV can you sustain where it feels like it’s an anxiety attack, where so much is happening that it almost becomes self-parody?”

He has said that the show enables “second-screen” watching—that is, looking at your phone at the same time—but it’s hard to look away.

Whereas a show like Netflix’s “Emily in Paris” is happy for its viewers to step back for ten minutes knowing that they won’t miss anything important, “Industry” crams in arc-changing twists—companies falling, relationships ending—in mere minutes.

A viewer might miss the pivotal, split-second reveal that Henry has an intense fetish for urine.

“Mad Men” built itself on the slow burn, each twist arduously set up.

In contrast, Down told me of “Industry,” “The show works best when it’s operating at a very, very fast pace.”

This sense of speed is heightened by the visual and auditory landscape of the show, which captures the frenetic way we experience life as refracted through digital technology.

The cinematography is improvisational; the frame wavers, whirls around, and chases the characters.

Federico Cesca, a cinematographer for Season 3, explained, “The camera is very reactive to the action, not the other way around.”

Cesca tries to instill suspense—the camera, like the audience, doesn’t know what’s going to happen next.

He works to keep the set free of standing lighting in order to move more freely.

“It’s shot a little bit like you were doing a documentary,” he said.

The camera swings inquisitively, the way someone might wield a smartphone; certain shots resemble the clips you might catch on social media documenting an embarrassing public incident.

Yasmin, in particular, is surrounded by the panopticon of phone cameras, from passersby as well as paparazzi.

A bus rider captures her chugging from an extremely expensive bottle of red wine, a gift from Henry.

As the camera hurtles around, the soundtrack does, too.

The synth-heavy music, evoking the lasers of a space battle in a nineteen-seventies science-fiction movie, is by the electronic composer Nathan Micay and has served as one of the defining features of “Industry.”

It is propulsive and insistent, sometimes occluding the action by persisting beyond entire scenes.

“I try to think of the whole thing as a pop song, almost,” Micay told me.

For the young characters, “being on a trading floor is like being on a dance floor at Berghain, in Berlin,” he said. “I wanted the music to have that level of kinetic energy and jubilation and euphoria.”

Micay described a note that he has often received from Kay and Down:

“Do what you did, but make it sick.”

By now, he said, he knows “what their vision of ‘sick’ is.”

In each season, he has upped the intensity.

Micay’s signature pattern for “Industry,” the chord-fracturing notes of an arpeggio, has got faster over time.

In the first season, the arpeggios were in sixteenth notes; in the second season, they shrank to thirty-second and sixty-fourth notes.

In the third, each note in a sixteenth-note arpeggio is sliced into its own arpeggio of thirty-second notes.

Drums come in for the first time this season, inspired by the otherworldly soundtrack to the 1988 sci-fi anime film “Akira.”

“You lose yourself in the sauce,” Micay said.

When Yasmin goes to a posh basement handball court to meet Henry, ahead of his company’s I.P.O., a dark low-pitched synth blares over the scene, as if a void is opening underneath the characters.

As the season progresses and tensions rise, the synths grow increasingly complex.

“It’s more and more like this house of cards is about to tumble,” Micay said.

Things do tumble—you can depend on “Industry” for a non-incremental plot.

The third season ends with such momentum, so far from its beginning, that it would be impossible to predict or spoil.

The show has not yet been renewed for a fourth, but it charges ahead regardless; there is little hint of closure.

“Industry” might be seen as extreme: too fast, too loud, too confusing.

But if the past few months have taught us anything, it’s that reality itself swerves too quickly to be coherent.

The culture of our moment is responding to this feeling of acceleration by embracing it.

Therapeutic ketamine has become legal.

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Some of the most indelible sounds of the summer, such as Charli XCX’s album “BRAT” and the soundtrack to Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers,” are synth-club bangers, less interested in morality than in pure brain-tickling pleasure.

TikTok influencers turn their lives into moment-by-moment content, and the algorithmic feed serves them to millions of viewers. The twentieth-century modernist credo was “Make it new”; we are entering a phase of “Make it more.”

One can’t fault Down and Kay’s characters for leaning in.

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