INDUSTRY IS THE best show you’re not watching. The HBO and BBC co-production is about to enter into its third season on HBO, but seems primed to become the network’s next super buzzy property. Released during the pandemic in the HBO Monday slot, the third season is now moving to Sundays, taking the primetime, post-House of the Dragon slot. Its cast is full of bright young stars. Marisa Abela just played Amy Winehouse in Back to Black; Myha’la appeared alongside Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali in Sam Esmail’s Leave the World Behind; Harry Lawtey will feature in the upcoming Joker sequel later this fall and is often thrown around as a dark horse candidate to take on the mantle of James Bond.
Set in the world of London’s high-pressure banking, ahem, industry, the show will also see the return of Kit Harington to HBO. He’ll join the cast this season alongside Barry’s Sarah Goldberg. The show is deeply entertaining to watch, with electric dialogue and some of the best character writing since Mad Men.
While we absolutely recommend watching every episode, well, there might not be enough time for you to catch up before the premiere on Sunday. If you’re pressed for time and need to quickly take stock (see what we did there?) in the show’s events before diving into season 3, well, we’ve got you covered with this handy recap of the first two seasons.
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Industry Season 1 Recap
Harper Stern (Myha’la), Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela), Gus Sackey (David Jonsson), and Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey) are all new graduates who are selected for entry-level positions at the prestigious London bank Pierpoint & Co. However, the idea is that while there are a bunch of roles initially up for grabs, they’ll eventually face an intentional Reduction in Force, aka a RIF, in six months, which will determine who actually gets to stay or goes. Keen to make a strong impression, Harper begins to court the favor of senior Pierpoint staffer Eric Tao (Ken Leung). Harper’s desire to make a big impact is rooted in the fact that she’s hoping to make herself indispensable—considering she’s lied about actually graduating college and has falsified her transcript.
Throughout the course of the pre-RIF period, the grads try to find every little advantage to get ahead. For self-starter Harper, that means taking on a client like Nicole (Sarah Parish), who makes an advance on her. For trust-fund baby Yasmin, that means staying in the sexist environment of Pierpoint, as cultivated by her direct manager, Kenny (Conor MacNeill). Harper eventually finds herself in a tug-of-war between Eric (who eventually learns about Harper’s transcript) and Daria (Freya Mavor). The former wants to keep the ‘boys club,’ cut-throat nature alive, having succeeded in that model for so long, while Daria wants to change the culture. That comes to fruition when, after a tense meeting about how Harper fumbled a deal with a major client, Eric locks Harper in his office. Harper ends up telling Daria about it, and she’s encouraged to file a complaint against Eric, which she does, and it results in his termination. Additionally, Yasmin and Robert begin a series of hot and heavy flirting—with him subjecting himself to all kinds of power games in pursuit of her (including a moment where she encourages him to, uh, eat his own ejaculate).
RIF day arrives, and with it, a series of presentations. Gus, having grown disillusioned with the process, uses his presentation to rattle off a rather colorful axiom at the encouragement of Rishi (Sagar Radia), one of the desk traders. Harper has an anxiety attack and ends up leaving her presentation without saying a word. Robert hasn’t been able to keep a consistent set of clients, and his fate is left hanging. Yasmin manages to keep her role as well. The major point of tension in the finale comes down to Harper making a choice between Eric and Daria. After the presentations, Pierpoint bigwig Bill Adler (Trevor White) asks Harper to recant her complaint about Eric; having flubbed the presentation and in need of a lifeline, Harper does just that. As a result, Daria is let go, and Yasmin, who planned to work with Daria, is furious at Harper for choosing to help cultivate the bad culture at Pierpoint.
Industry Season 2 Recap
As Pierpoint forces employees to return to the office post-Covid, Harper is reluctant to return after her panic attack. Working remotely out of a hotel—and building up quite the bill—she comes across Jesse Bloom (Jay Duplass), a hedge fund manager who scored big during the pandemic. Harper’s eventual return to office results in her having to directly confront strained relationships, mostly in the form of Rishi and Yasmin, the latter of whom is still livid about how things ended back at the end of season 1. With Kenny now in rehab, Yasmin is leveraging her portfolio of wealthy friends to bring business to Pierpoint, basically functioning as the desk head. In the interim, she’s also adopted a more adversarial tone, down to the fact she’s berating new graduates just like she was. She eventually meets Celeste (Katrine De Candole), a mercurial figure who works in Pierpoint’s private wealth management division, or PWMD.
Harper, confidence at her lowest, grows obsessed with trying to land Bloom at Pierpoint as a way to show her value to both Eric and the firm. After botching another trade with a legacy client, Harper manages to offload the trade to Bloom and proceeds to go all-in on capturing his business at the expense of Pierpoint’s priorities. Eric begins to feel distant from her, compounded by the effect that the institution itself has sent an executive, Daniel Van Deventer (Alex Alomar Akpobome), aka DVD, to look at potentially eliminating the London office. Meanwhile, Yasmin transitions over to the PWMD side of things, where she and Celeste begin playing a series of psychosexual games. Robert eventually lands Nicole as a client, and the two start a sexual relationship after bonding over their shared background from humble beginnings, trying to make it work within England’s complicated class system—although their relationship becomes strained after he learns Nicole made a move on Harper.
Gus, now working for a minister, eventually begins tutoring Bloom’s son before eventually dating him. Meanwhile, DVD tells Harper that Adler plans to shut down the London office. At a dinner with Robert and a grad named Venetia (Indy Lewis), Nicole ends up making a pass at Venetia. From there, Pierpoint’s systematic cover-up of Nicole’s behavior of harassment is used as a bargaining chip by Harper and Eric to keep the London office intact, albeit with a skeleton crew of employees. Yasmin, who is working to bring her father and his fund into Pierpoint, grows frustrated by its culture and lashes out at her father (Adam Levy) for his behavior of grooming younger women, which she’s discovered.
Frustrated by the red tape on the governmental side of things, Gus accidentally leaks some sensitive information to Harper, who passes it along to Bloom in a last-ditch attempt to curry his favor. After Bloom goes on television, talking about the info to boost his own holdings, Gus is let go for leaking the info in the first place, and Harper tells Eric how she passed along the info. Yasmin, Harper, Eric, and Robert all go to Rishi’s wedding. During the festivities, Robert goes out to score some drugs for Yasmin but is arrested and bailed out the next morning by none other than Nicole.
On the first day back to work after the wedding, Harper is surprised to see Rishi in the office, as he was one of the people, along with DVD, which she and Eric recommended to Alder to cut. After telling her that he’d paid for her whole hotel bill, Eric marches Harper into HR, where she’s fired for falsifying her transcript. Eric views it as a mercy-killing of sorts, an attempt to get Harper to curb her worst impulses — like insider trading — before they get the best of her.
With that, now you’re ready to dig into the crazy, exciting, and engaging world of Pierpoint and Industry’s third season.
