In the latest episode of Industry — the HBO drama that follows the usually unhinged, occasionally evil, and always entertaining exploits of young financiers at the London offices of the fictional American bank Pierpoint & Co. — the well-heeled bankers have swapped business attire for costumes, in the name of raising money for needy children.
Posh nepo baby Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) — whose publishing magnate father has suddenly disappeared, prompting tabloid photographers to stalk her every move — dons a wig and Harvard sweatshirt to give her very best Nineties-era Princess Diana. Rishi Ramdani (Sagar Radia) — a foul-mouthed boor whose chauvinistic workplace conduct is stuck in the past — has dressed as Sacha Baron Cohen’s satirical character Ali G. Plucky nouveau riche newbie Sweetpea Golightly (Miriam Petche) — yes, that is her name — channels “Ginger Spice” Geri Halliwell in a red wig and Union Jack dress. And Eric Tao (Ken Leung), the increasingly erratic and cutthroat team leader, is Henry VIII. Go figure.
Each of these costumes is a not-so-subtle nod to where these characters currently stand in the Industry kingdom. It’s a show that is ostensibly about money — making money, specifically. But really, it’s about where you stand in the pecking order — and for the British characters, that comes down to the U.K.’s brutal social class system, where it’s not just about having money, but having the right kind of money (old) and being the right sort of person (posh). Industry is basically a string of micro-signifiers (and microaggressions) that explain how the characters are either cursed or blessed by their proximity to Britain’s elite. Don’t let the finance jargon fool you: Class is Industry’s central tension and shared language. It is the gateway to understanding the series — and modern British life — on a whole other level.
THE NOTABLE ABSENCE from Pierpoint’s costume day is Robert Spearling (Harry Lawtey), who is instead picking out a tie for a high-stakes appearance in front of a U.K. government Select Committee. The charge is that Lumi — a green energy startup whose financial affairs were being (mis-)managed by Pierpoint — has gone bust, costing the British taxpayers billions. Rob was tasked with being a glorified babysitter to Lumi’s petulant and posh CEO, Henry Muck (Kit Harrington), and has now been offered up by Pierpoint as a representative.
Shortly after the hearing begins, an opposition politician starts to give Rob a furious grilling. Soon, the politician realizes that Rob isn’t just a representative — he’s a sacrificial lamb. “One statement from a Lumi employee called you ‘Sir Henry’s whipping boy,’” the committee member says. “I’d say you’re more Pierpoint’s whipping boy.”
From the first season of Industry, class anxiety has been central to Rob’s character. Arriving at Pierpoint from rural, working-class Wales via the prestigious Oxford University, Rob initially believed the company would be a meritocracy. Gradually, though, he began to see that he will probably never be the right sort of person for them. Instead, he found sanctuary in various mentors, like Nicole Craig, a brash client from a similar background who he started sleeping with. In the third-season opener, he and Nicole sit together after having sex. Rob tells her that he doesn’t need a “toff CEO” Henry Muck to say “well done” to him. “Yeah, you do,” she laughs. “That’s all you’ve ever wanted! Validation from your betters. We’re all just chips in a hierarchy.”
Tension between Rob and Henry has been brewing all season. In the first episode, the pair get into a strangely homoerotic fight in the “adult soft play” area in Lumi’s painfully millennial office space. Afterwards, Henry gets in Rob’s face and says: “Why don’t you call me a posh cunt and be done with it? Two words instead of 30. It’d be easier for you. Go on, say it. I bet it gives someone like you a genuine thrill.”
Great attention to detail has been paid to Rob’s class signifiers. At one point, Nicole mocks a silver necklace he was given by his girlfriend. “You look like a fucking club rep from Zante,” she says. (Zante is a budget holiday destination in Greece, a jab any working-class person trying to rebrand themselves would be mortified by.) In Episode Five, after the parliamentary questioning, Henry jokes that Rob “looks like a TM Lewin worker,” referencing an accessible formal-wear brand in the U.K. that actual rich people wouldn’t be seen dead in. Henry also tells Rob that he’s “surprised” that Rob is such a bad bullshitter. “Isn’t that what the Oxford tutorial system is meant to teach us?” (British translation: We might have gone to the same university, but we’re clearly not from the same world.) It is in these moments where we learn Rob’s insecurities aren’t in his head; those around him see his status as a weakness, too.
It’s not just Rob who has been made to feel like he’ll never be inside the fold. Up until this season, we haven’t learned much about Rishi, the strangely endearing loudmouth misogynist. But this season, he gets his own episode, “White Mischief.” Here, we see that Rishi has moved his wife and young son to an old-money village in Somerset, a bucolic county in southwest England where she grew up.
Surrounded by his posh wife’s family and friends, there is an obvious racial undercurrent to the fact that, in a million small ways, Rishi feels unwelcome there. This is interwoven with classism: Around a campfire, he is asked about the prime minister’s upcoming mini-budget, which is rumored to cut taxes for the highest earners. “If he announces half the things they’re suggesting tomorrow, we’re in for a good few years,” he says. “Well, at least people like us are, anyway.” The comment is followed by an awkward silence, where the implication is that the group don’t consider him like them at all.
Abela enjoys Yasmin’s posh life aboard a yacht
Nick Strasburg/HBO
Later in the episode, Rishi’s wife jokes that, if he had his way, their house would be decorated “Santorini white” with “silver Christmas ornaments”— a slight on his ideas of taste that makes him visibly embarrassed. The pair end up getting into a huge argument, where she says she feels used as a vehicle for exploring his upper-class fantasies. “You love your fucking English country rose! I don’t want to be someone’s country wife,” she says. “Some dull breeding machine you spunk into.” Again, class is positioned as central to Rishi’s character: His marriage, where he lives, and his ambitions. It unlocks a more complex and vulnerable side of him.
If Rob and Rishi have been working hard to be accepted by the elite, Yasmin has had the opposite journey. Up until this point, she has lived a comfortable life as the old-money heiress to her father’s publishing fortune. But at the start of Season Three, her dad has gone AWOL amid an embezzlement scandal. Yasmin’s last name, which has allowed her to float through life, is instantly toxic. And now, she’s having to work for her place on the top rung of the ladder.
Yasmin seems to find comfort in men like Henry, who are similar to her father — wealthy, sleazy, and weak-willed. At the Select Committee hearing, allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior are made against Henry. When Yasmin later accuses him of an “abuse of power,” he responds: “Everything’s an abuse of power for me! I can only fuck down.”
Yasmin and Henry seem similarly miserable about their position in the ruling class, but are determined to stay there regardless. Both are stalked by the shadows of father figures who have let them down and talked them down. In Episode Two, over dinner, Henry recounts to Yasmin something his dad used to tell him before he killed himself: “When you’re born with a silver spoon in your mouth, people are going to assume you’re an idiot.” This is the thing about Yasmin and Henry: They seem like an odd pairing, until you realize that, in each other, they see the potential to prove their dads wrong — and show everyone else that they belong at the top.
WATCHING INDUSTRY, IT’S easy to be distracted by the private jets, the endless lines of cocaine, and all the kinky sex. But it’s in the smallest details that we learn the most. Much of the show’s class commentary is actually unspoken, like later in the series, when we’re shown a photo of Yasmin’s father from his time as part of the Bullingdon Club — a notorious all-male dinner club at Oxford University, to which real-life prime ministers Boris Johnson and David Cameron both belonged. (The galling stories about the members of this club are endless, from turning up to restaurants in tuxedos and completely trashing them, to burning £50 bills in front of homeless people.) It’s a tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment that tells us everything we need to know about Yasmin’s father. He didn’t just turn bad, he’s rotten to the core.
In this week’s episode, at the Select Committee hearing, Rob is dramatically saved from becoming the fall guy for the Lumi disaster when energy secretary Aurore Adekunle shows up. The Conservative Party’s rising star takes responsibility and resigns. Afterwards, as a mark of respect for putting himself in the firing line, Henry invites Rob to a private members’ club to meet some of his “friends.” Rob finds himself in the room with Henry’s old-money media mogul uncle Alexander — who owns many papers, including The Daily Mail and The Sun, which are among the most influential for the British establishment — and his godfather Otto, a shady billionaire who seems to enjoy pulling the strings at the top echelons of business and politics.
Suddenly, the supposedly disgraced Adekunle arrives at the club. She is handed a glass of champagne and heralded as “our future prime minister.” It turns out that the whole thing has been a quid-pro-quo, in exchange for their help with advancing her political career. Rob seems both disgusted and stunned by how these people somehow benefit from scandal — in this case, one that has pushed him, someone who is viewed as “expendable,” to the brink. He sees how the ruling class operates with impunity, where everything is a game.
At the end of Episode Five, a jubilant Henry proposes a toast: “To friends, old—” he says, before purposefully looking at Rob, “—and new.” In other words, the “whipping boy” has, for a brief moment, climbed upward in the pecking order. Rob has finally been accepted into their circle — but his eyes have also been opened.
The very existence of Henry Muck — a man whose status is both sickening and alluring — in the Industry-verse feels like a way for Yasmin and Rob to be triggered into seeing what’s important to them, and what they need to do to fulfill their ambitions. This is why watching this show purely through the prism of their fallouts, or the volatile financial markets, is sort of like watching sports without any commentary. For the British characters, class is the commentary — the thing that, more than any other, helps us to understand their choices and behavior. Co-creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay’s show is nowhere near as blatant an “eat the rich” takedown as Saltburn, but that’s what makes it so effective. When it comes to capturing that specific, subtle brutality of how the class system permeates British society, Industry is in a class of its own.