A few days before Christmas, HBO released the trailer for Season 4 of Industry, the kinetic, neon-lit series about troubled, young moneymakers in London that returns January 11. Set to a remix of New Order’s “True Faith,” the video contained glimpses of tried-and-true Industry ingredients that have been a part of the show since its 2020 debut: Harper Stern (played by Myha’la) being defiant, a Bloomberg screen tracking a stock gapping down, Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) engaging in some manner of psychosexual game, pulsing beats, and gloomy skies. But it also signaled that this will be the show’s most sprawling installment yet, with a scope reaching well beyond the early-season confines of the Pierpoint & Co. London trading floor. We see hotel suites and ocean waves and new characters who are ostensibly essential, like Charlie Heaton’s rumpled journo and Max Minghella’s Whitney Halberstram, a suave operator who is “building a democratic financial institution”–slash–“bank killer” named Tender. This all tracks with a recent profile in The New Yorker in which showrunners Konrad Kay and Mickey Down identified the corporate espionage film Michael Clayton as an inspiration for their newest season. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Industry is a small but growing show that experienced a jump in viewership from “the second-least-watched show on HBO of all time” in its debut season, according to Kay, to an average of 1.6 million viewers in Season 3. Now, Industry looks to level up from a word-of-mouth stock tip to a core holding in everyone’s TV portfolio. With that in mind, here are some questions and answers about where we left off last season and what we know going into this one, organized for people with differing levels of Industry experience. Meet Me in the Loo: A Journey Through the Many Bathroom Scenes of ‘Industry’ Meet Me in the Loo: A Journey Through the Many Bathroom Scenes of ‘Industry’ Meet Me in the Loo: A Journey Through the Many Bathroom Scenes of ‘Industry’ Welcome to the show formerly about Pierpoint & Co.! I see you’re new here—either because you worked your ass off and stepped on some backs along the way or because your last name got your foot in the door. Either way, I’m sure you’re eager to learn what all the fuss is about. There are no stupid questions (HR said we had to say that).  What’s all this, then? Is there tweet-length literature to educate me on what Industry is about? Industry trawls the rock bottom of high finance in London’s Canary Wharf, dredging up little horrors for sport. It’s a nature show about the life cycle of strivers who are round-tripping between self-preservation and self-destruction—and the loo, obv. Buy! A nature show? Does it ever show them mating? Oh, does it ever! (Sometimes in said loo, too.) Hell yeah, what’s the best way to watch? If you’ve got lots of free time coming up—and access to a screen that is removed from anyone who might bristle at the sight of semen or the sounds of stressful synth beats—catch up on the first three seasons.  I’d suggest (a) staggering your viewing a bit, because binging episodes of this show back-to-back-to-back can leave you with a real cocaine headache; (b) turning on closed captioning, partly to decipher the occasional Irish accent but mostly to receive the full bounty of off-color trading-floor banter, particularly from Rishi (Sagar Radia); and (c) not giving up and quitting if you don’t love it right away, because the show has evolved quite a bit! If you’re waffling, just skip to Season 3—which was my favorite so far. It is structured in a pretty self-contained manner, and while you may not always know the backstory for what’s going on, you’ll have most of the context you need to watch Season 4. ‘Industry’ Season 3 Was a Celebration of Both the Vulnerable and the Damned ‘Industry’ Season 3 Was a Celebration of Both the Vulnerable and the Damned ‘Industry’ Season 3 Was a Celebration of Both the Vulnerable and the Damned There’s a lot going on at your desk day to day, and you never know when some VP or managing director is going to tap you on the shoulder with a question (or hit you up with a dreaded pls fix). Which is why it’s best practice to stay up to speed on who’s who and what’s what. Here are a few reminders of where we left off. Can we step off the desk to quickly sync up on where things stand at the end of Season 3? Gladly! As I mentioned before, Season 3 felt like a bit of a departure from the trading-floor confines of Industry’s earlier days, in which a great deal of the action involved a headset and took place at “the desk” at Pierpoint & Co., the fictional, big, posh bank where nearly every character either worked or had an account. (It’s partly because of those confines that Industry was given time to grow—it wasn’t very expensive to make.) Season 3, in contrast, kicked off on a yacht in Majorca and concluded on a sofa in the United States, with significant time spent at a Saltburn-esque country manse in between. It showcased multiple workplaces, like the libbed-out enterprise FutureDawn, and included a drowning, an engagement, a grilling by a government committee, and a bullet to the head over a gambling loan. Wait, this is how the other half lives? By the end of last season, the mighty Pierpoint had spiraled into a liquidity crisis, reminiscent of the 2007-08 real-world meltdowns, that culminated in the firm being bailed out by an Egyptian wealth fund and renamed Al-Miraj Pierpoint. The London trading floor was shuttered, and in the finale, onetime bigwig Eric Tao roamed the empty space and was even moved to pick up the phone and make a fake call, just to feel something. “It’s elegiac, it’s nostalgic,” Down told me about that scene in 2024. “It’s also: Fuck, I gave all my life to this and it’s now gone. Who am I now?” And that’s true of not only Eric but also Industry viewers awaiting a Season 4 in which the show’s obvious locus of power no longer exists. “This thing you watched for 24 episodes is now just, like, on a scrap heap,” Down remarked. “And it feels like it’s reflective of how cutthroat we say this industry is.” Whose stock is rising and falling?  We’ll go through the main characters as featured on the Season 3 Industry poster, starting in the back and going clockwise: As for some of the people who aren’t featured on the poster, here’s a quick Mad Money–style lightning round. Sweetpea becoming important at work again? BUY! Jesse Bloom starting a new firm with Harper? SELL! Anraj: BUY! Kenny: SELL! Yasmin possibly being pregnant with Rob’s child? Having examined the upcoming footage, it brings me no pleasure to say: SELL! DVD one day returning? PRETTY PLEASE! Henry Muck’s uncle’s media empire? HOLD! Creepy sexcapades? BUY, BUY, BUY! BET EVERYTHING YOU HAVE! EMPTY YOUR 401K IF YOU MUST! Rishi’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day Rishi’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day Rishi’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day You clawed your way out of the crab bucket and took a real seat at the table. Your former colleagues now only glimpse you in passing. You no longer write emails—you engage in thought leadership. The nanny sent you a video of your toddler daughter saying she wants to be “a relationships guy” when she grows up. You care only about what’s new and what’s next, because if you ever slowed down then the regrets might catch up … whoops, did I say that out loud? Talk to me. What is this … Tender? Much has yet to be revealed, but from context clues, we can determine that Tender is some sort of money-adjacent app with aspirations of becoming something greater and allegations of acting shady. Is it Industry’s version of FTX? A neo–PayPal Mafia? Maybe more of a Tether? That much isn’t yet clear. But it appears as though both a FinDigest journalist and the dogged Harper Stern are about to be on the case. I see a lot of new faces—except they all look familiar. Who are these people, and what have they done for me lately? Minghella, who plays Tender exec Whitney Halberstram, was previously a Winklevii associate in The Social Network and a conflicted love interest in The Handmaid’s Tale. (His late dad, the director Anthony, was, among many other things, a producer on Michael Clayton.) Kal Penn—Kumar of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle renown and a White House adviser during the Obama administration—appears as another Tender bigwig. Who else: right, that woman in the trailer who appears to be engaging in quite the merger and acquisition with Yas and Henry? Why, if it isn’t Kiernan Shipka, best known as Mad Men’s Sally Draper. I know, I know. Heaton, who plays the journalist, is also in Stranger Things. Finally, if you watched Ted Lasso, you might recognize Toheeb Jimoh, who joins the cast as a character named Kwabena Bannerman. What are Industry’s big ideas this season? I suspect the show will have something to say about fintech eating the world and the blurred lines between opportunity and exploitation. But I think the broader focus will be on who exactly gets heard when they speak up.  In the latest trailer, Eric asks Harper: “Can we be loud enough?” Sometimes being right is only Page 1 of the playbook. You also have to show your work, state your case, and shift sentiment to your side. “Perception is power,” reads the caption to a brief Industry Season 4 teaser that was posted in December. “Narrative is important,” Yasmin remarks in the clip, “so you might as well control it.”  Industry has always been a show about how to fake it till you make it—that’s practically the whole job description of a first-year analyst at any big bank. But this is Season 4, and our protagonists aren’t first-year analysts anymore. Now they’re the ones capable of setting the agenda and telling the story, operating from places of actual influence and power. Or hey, maybe I just noticed all of this because I recently read that trend piece in The Wall Street Journal about how “companies are desperately seeking storytellers” to “wrest greater control of their narratives”! People were talking about that on my LinkedIn! I’ll bet they were!  What other insights can we derive from the latest literature?  The most important Season 4 literature is Rebecca Mead’s New Yorker story—which includes, among other things, the very interesting nugget that the showrunners’ deal with HBO runs through 2027! In addition, we can examine the various teasers and trailers the network has dropped.  In one of them, a moody Nina Simone–backed montage, we see glimpses of the absurd (Yas and Henry arguing while wearing powdered wigs), the intriguing (Henry and someone—Whitney Halberstram?—dirty dancing at a club), and the alarming (someone—the journalist? Eric?!—falling from a building). Sweetpea, with one humdinger of a shiner, stares into a Hulk-smashed mirror. Harper chain-smokes while sitting on a makeshift HQ floor and sifting through boxes of documents, looking not unlike Michael Clayton’s Arthur. It all ends at a bar, where Yasmin and Harper finally speak: Yasmin: Will you look after me tonight? Harper: When the fuck are you going to look after me? Yasmin: Tonight. This slightly more refined version of the “two bitches telling each other exaacccttttlllyyy” meme is a fitting representation of the self-perpetuating dynamic between Harper and Yas. Their relationship—the joy and the jealousy, the loyalties and betrayals, the ever-shifting spread between what’s bid and what’s asked—is one that Down and Kay have described as being increasingly foundational to the series. Over the years, the characters have conspired like criminals and fought like sisters. With Rob’s departure, they’re the only two still around from their Season 1 entry-level cohort. And watching the full Season 4 trailer, it seems apparent that these women are again about to position themselves on opposite sides of a zero-sum trade. ‘Industry’ Creators Konrad Kay and Mickey Down on That Wild Season Finale ‘Industry’ Creators Konrad Kay and Mickey Down on That Wild Season Finale ‘Industry’ Creators Konrad Kay and Mickey Down on That Wild Season Finale Maybe you lived the dream and left on your own terms, but you were probably pushed out. Either way, you love to reminisce about how some of the best days of your life were when you were just a summer intern with nothing but upside. You have a lot of hot takes and time on your hands. [Exhales cigar cloud.] Should Industry have ended with Season 3? The story lines felt resolved enough to provide closure yet open-ended enough to inspire my own imagination. And that last scene of Rob’s face, pitching his magic mushrooms— It was psilocybin, just to be clear. —just really took me back to the beginning of Season 1 when everyone was interviewing for the job at Pierpoint. Just so full circle, you know?  When Season 3 was being made, there was a chance that Industry would indeed end this way; the show wasn’t renewed until most of the season had aired. And it would have been quite the elegant end. “Infinite Largesse” was a banger of a finale—including the literal bang that rocked Rishi’s apartment, which the showrunners had to cajole HBO into including.  One cool thing about Industry is the way its talent has grown alongside the show. Abela, who joined the cast straight out of drama school, told me in 2024 that while she initially felt some first-job jitters, she was mostly buoyed by “a huge amount of, like, delusion and freedom. Because I’d never done this before, so I didn't have anything to compare it to.” But that was half a decade ago. “We’ve grown up,” Kay told Complex following Season 3. “The actors have grown up, and the characters have grown up. The show is a bildungsroman of their lives, this innocence to experience.” How can I set myself up for success before the new season begins? Anything to read? Listen to? Watch?  If Harper is really focused on betting against overvalued companies via short-selling, as both the Season 3 finale and the Season 4 trailers suggest, you could read about firms like Citron and Hindenburg (or, as some sharp viewers have pointed out, specific traders like the short seller Fahmi Quadir). You could peruse one of several Michael Lewis books about houses of cards or listen to the various great Odd Lots podcasts with short-sale specialists. Perhaps you could brush up on the downfalls of companies like Luckin Coffee, Nikola, or Wirecard, or watch Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, the Oscar-nominated documentary about the energy darling’s implosion. Speaking of films, it’s never a bad time to watch Michael Clayton! (Ditto Margin Call, even if that one is a little more Season 3–coded.) And it’s always good fun to tune in to the showrunners’ appearances on The Ringer’s The Watch podcast. Finally, you could read what the showrunners themselves read. Kay told The New Yorker that he’d been mulling over Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Give it a look, and you’ll note that it references from the movie Heat, just like Industry has. “Like any group of shareholders,” Fisher writes about a band of thieves in the film, “[Neil] McCauley’s crew is held together by the prospect of future revenue; any other bonds are optional extras, almost certainly dangerous. Their arrangement is temporary, pragmatic and lateral—they know that they are interchangeable machine parts, that there are no guarantees, that nothing lasts.”  Now, if that doesn’t prepare you for a new season of Industry, I’m not sure what will.