Why everyone reading Rainmakers absolutely must watch TV’s Industry
Season Four of the show they're all talking about suddenly got very Rainmakers adjacent.
Hello Rainmakers,
Every once in a while a TV show comes along that smacks you in the face with its high stakes drama, sign of the times commentary, and it dares you to imagine how much further, which moral low point it could go to next.
It keeps popping up in meetings, usually an investment banker or lawyer saying - our culture is great, and nothing like that TV show they’re all watching. Yes, they mean Industry.
Rainmakers subscribers get two unique pieces a week, but also full access to our back catalogue of investigations, scoops, and insights, including updates from The Secret Investor, but also the odd surprise. Like this one.
When it started in 2021 Industry was like a super charged version of the 90s coming of age drama This Life: edgy, zeitgeisty, young, sweary and tinged with darkness and foreboding. It also made superstars of Jack Davenport and Andrew Lincoln (though scandalously not Daniela Nardini).
But now that we’re on season four of Industry, all available on the BBC iPlayer, it seems more like that other, must-see, can’t look away, screen depiction of the worst excesses of capitalism - Succession. It also shares with that televisual masterpiece the accomplished feat of creating an entire cast of characters you never actually like very much. Each one comes coloured with different shades of dreadful, ever capable of ethical breaches, self serving greed and appalling morality.
Industry started by following the contrasting paths of a bunch of graduates embarking on life at fictional London investment bank Pierpoint. Pulsing with sexual tension and twisted manipulation, it quickly pivots around the twists and turns in the relationships between American CV forger Harper Stern (the actor known known mononymously as Myha’la), silver spooned international publishing heiress Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) and working class Robbie Spearing from a council estate in Hull (played by Harry Lawtey). Though a slow burner, it nonetheless earned Lawtey and Abela roles depicting Richard Burton and Amy Winehouse (as well as a BAFTA), and they won’t be the only talent propelled up the A list by this series.
It rubs against real events very tightly, post-COVID, the KamiKwazi budget, the 2024 election, and how that all rippled through the trading floors of the city. There’s real drama when they’re shorting the pound, or second guessing government policy - proving that markets can be moved and can topple governments.
