‘Industry’ Season 4 Episode 1 recap: Natural porn killers

At the time of this writing, it is illegal to visit the adult website Pornhub in 23 of the United States of America, all of them Republican-controlled, without first submitting identification to the right-wing government. At the time of this writing, X, the social media network run by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk — a major supporter of the President of the United States of America, whom he saluted like Hitler the night of his inauguration, and a backer of far-right parties openly dedicated to white-supremacist ethnic cleansing across the globe — has been churning out CSAM and nonconsensual porn of any woman or child people request via its racist AI, Grok, which has “called” “itself” MechaHitler. 

These are facts you have to sit with if you want to understand the kind of people running the planet today. They are racist, misogynist scum who wield the power of the state to punish others, while holding it back so that the mega-rich can do literally whatever they want to whomever they want with no legal repercussions. It’s a mistake to call this hypocrisy: The double standard is the point. The only thing that makes any real difference is money, and the racial and gender hierarchies that make the mega-rich feel special and happy while they make that money. The power to make themselves happy at the expense of everyone else is what gets them off. 

Into this “brave new world,” as the odious right-wing investor turned member of the House of Lords Otto Mostyn puts it to Harper, steps Season 4 of Industry. Most shows wouldn’t run square at this underdiscussed plank of the global fascist platform. (In both the show and in reality, age verification laws were indeed instituted in the UK by the ostensibly left-leaning Labour party as part of its recent, politically and morally disastrous right-wing tilt.) Most shows also wouldn’t dare actually show you Donald Trump as an in-world character (albeit from a distance), taking so long at the golf course while refusing to let anyone play through that other players quit in disgust. 

But that’s Industry. It’s a show that does what most shows don’t, won’t, and/or can’t bring themselves to. In this episode, this includes Harper Stern (Myha’la), naked except for a strap-on dildo, which she fondles in an pantomime of masculine power before using it to fuck her latest conquest. (Much more about him later.) 

We rejoin Harper, dressed like an Andor villain, in the tony offices of Mostyn Asset Management, the company she cofounded with the odious Otto. Their M.O. is to use illegally obtained information to target crooked companies with equally crooked shorts, investments designed to make Mostyn money if the company they invest in sinks. 

But Harper’s results haven’t exactly matched up with her imperial appearance, and she has a lot riding on a single short: Siren, a subscription-based porn website said to dwarf OnlyFans’ user base. (So much the worse for Harper’s employee Sweetpea Golightly, played by Miriam Petche, who’s an OF superstar by night.)

Harper obtains inside information that the government plans to call out Siren by name in Parliament from her spy-for-hire, her former coworker Rishi (Sagar Radia). After a half-hearted suicide attempt and a stint in rehab, it’s impossible for him to clear the financial industry’s background checks; working as Harper’s private investigator is how he keeps the lights on.

But her initial success with the play is undermined by Otto. In the new right-wing hellscape currently under construction, he explains, it no longer pays politically to undermine immoral corporations — not Siren, about which he couldn’t give a shit, but the various public-utility scams his peer group have cooked up. 

“I hired you as a face,” he sneers at Harper when she touts his prior faith in her acumen. “This woke shit,” he hisses, “no longer moves the needle.” Like Danny Huston’s villain in the new Naked Gun, he brags about his newfound freedom to use the r-slur again, a freedom currently being enjoyed extravagantly by the ruling regime of the USA. (It’s no coincidence that they’re also dismantling special education and acting like having autism is a fate worse than death. The dehumanization never stops with just slurs.)

Harper’s business relationships with men are…complicated. For starters, she’s currently sleeping with one of her employees, Kabena Bannerman (Toheeb Jimoh). In fact, just about every man she encounters in work setting this episode, she either fucks, yells at/gets yelled at by. (The “both” guy has a mini-stroke and shatters her glass table as a result; Harper dismisses this as “inconvenient.”) 

So when she reaches out to her ghastly mentor, nemesis, and most reliable friend (somehow), Eric Tao (Ken Leung), to see if he’s interested in a partnership, maybe it shouldn’t surprise us. The two patched things up near the end of last episode, as Harper’s increasingly sociopathic behavior as an investor won Eric’s admiration and approval at last. Now stranded in a boring retirement that alternates between hitting the links behind “47” and blowjobs on tap from a much younger girlfriend in whom he barely seems interested, Eric leaps at the chance to reunite with his old protégé. The idea this time is honest communication and equal footing. (We’ll see how long that lasts with these two psychopaths.)

When you’re young you’re full of ideas, Eric explains with his voice breaking, but as you get nearer the end you realize that the only thing that matters is— “Money?” Harper interrupts him, half-joking. It takes him a second or two, but he agrees.

Along the way, at a party thrown by her, uh, friend? Yasmin (Marisa Abela), Harper makes the acquaintance, and then some, of Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella). Chief financial officer of a payment processing company called Tender that isn’t afraid to do business with porn companies and other alleged unsavories, Whit is now locked in a battle of wills with his college best friend turned company co-founder, CEO Jay Atterbury (Kal Penn). With the UK’s age-verification bill on the way, Whit wants out of the smut game. Jay — who still dresses, drinks, acts, and smells like a college kid — wants to maintain the company’s original wild spirit.

Like all the major male romantic interests on Industry, Whit is happily submissive in the bedroom. Tat strap-on mentioned earlier belongs to him, and it’s his idea for Harper to use it on him. But he’s far less meek in the boardroom, where he defenestrates his long-time friend Jay by bringing up various moral and hygienic deficiencies that technically violate his contract. It’s a cold play, but given how gross Jay seems, you could read it as reasonable.

Until you see the kind of person Whit really is, and there are hints of that early on. Take Whit’s put-upon assistant, Haley (Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka). For one thing, Whit’s the kind of guy who’ll knock over a chair in anger, then yell “Haley — chair,” and expect her to clean it up for him even though she wasn’t even the room. Eww.

At the start of the episode, Haley goes home from the club with a guy who, not so coincidentally, keeps running into her that night. The next morning, he reveals he’s an investigative journalist named Jim Dycker (Stranger Things’ Charlie Heaton). Now, this move is straight from the Olivia Nuzzi School for Journalistic Ethics. But both with Haley and later on the phone with Harper, whom he contacts for information, Jim seems legit concerned that Tender isn’t just sketchy but evil, and that Whit did something NDA-able to his previous personal assistant.

The more we see of Whit, the more that tracks. His megalomaniacal affect after overseeing the purge of Jay. The Michael Clayton–esque commercial for Tender’s shiny happy future that he commissions. His cold-blooded conduct with his own best friend. All of it seems to indicate that Jim is on to something.

But lest you think it’s all sunshine and roses for the rich straight white men who run the world, consider poor Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington). He’s in the grips of another bender of drugs and depression, even while Yasmin hosts Harper, Whit, and the Labour government’s chief lieutenant in the war against free sp— sorry, To Protect Our Children, Minister for Industry Jennifer Bevan (Amy James-Kelly). With Tender severing its relationship with Siren, Whit’s ready to be part of this brave new authoritarian world.

And boy, so is Industry. If ever there were a show tailor made to explore the contemporary fascist right’s nightmare cocktail of sexual neurosis, billionaire sadism, and seething hatred of women and minorities — even among the women and minorities involved. Sure, Harper is outraged at Otto making her what she refers to as “a puppet in blackface” to cover for his own criminality, but she took that job knowing the man she was helping and the kind of world he’d prefer. As the old story goes, she knew he was a snake when she took him in. 

But that’s just it: Harper’s the biggest snake in the jungle. I mean this person is a monster. No one thinks so to look at her: She’s a tiny Black woman in a world full of big, boisterous, mostly white men. But you need look no further than the way she seems to enjoy that guy having a stroke in front of her, gleeful to see him get some comeuppance for the combined crimes of taking his money out of her fund and failing to make her cum. She has no relationships that aren’t transactional, no ideals beyond money and power and getting her back blown out now and then. Fail her on any of those fronts and she’ll scrape you off her shoe.

Appropriately enough for a show that now co-stars the former Sally Draper, Industry’s sexual frankness is an indicator of how the show takes the Mad Men model for a spin and guns the engine until metal grinds pavement. You want a bunch of wealthy, well-put-together people getting angry in an office? Pierpoint, the former home of most of the cast, makes Sterling Cooper look like Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood. (Like a host of cast members, most notably David Jonsson’s Gus Sackey and Harry Lawtey’s Robert Spearing, Pierpoint is gone, but the show doesn’t seem to have missed a step.)

You want a gimlet eye cast on capitalism? Creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, who both wrote and directed this episode, are bitingly cynical about our economic system — Whit himself refers to it as “a carcinogen” — while chronicling a field that lacks advertising’s fig leaf of creativity. Capitalism on Mad Men is consumerist and crass; on Industry it’s actively dystopian. 

You want good-looking moneyed people being sexy? Imagine if Mad Men’s most explicit moments were an episode-by-episode baseline and you have Industry. Harper’s graphic sex scenes, bookended by lengthy stretches in which she just lies or stands around nude. Haley convincing Jim to get over his jitters about taking advantage of a drunk woman and go down on her by saying “My ex says my pussy looks like pink bubble gum.” You’re not gonna hear lines like that on Pluribus.

All of this is stylishly shot and soundtracked, neither of which is as easy to do as it sounds. (Ask Stranger Things Season 5.) Jim and Haley eyeing each other across the dance floor as “True Faith” by New Order booms over the speakers, then groping each other to a remix of the Prodigy’s “Firestarter.” Sir Henry playing a Henry Purcell composition used in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange as a slow Kubrickian fully reveals his Barry Lyndon–esque state and surroundings. That majestic shot of Harper wielding the strap-on, accompanied by Nathan Micay’s electronic score burbles and skitters. From an audiovisual perspective, Industry fucks — all while chronicling the most compelling collection of sociopaths this side of The Sopranos, too.

Industry is a freefall into the moral void, as thrilling as it is terrifying. It’s the only show that dares to depict our world today as it is: an elevator shaft without a bottom to hit. I’m so glad this miserable, wonderful show is back.

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.