Industry, series 3, review: finance drama matures into something truly magnificent

After two gripping series set in the claustrophobic furnace of high-finance London, the drama spreads its wings and soars in the third

5/5
With Succession gone, Industry (BBC One/HBO), the finance drama set in the world of a London investment bank, is now one of HBO’s very few contemporary dramas. Prestige TV has, in the main, veered towards literary fantasy, perhaps because you can cleave to source material with a pre-existing fanbase and mitigate the risk of big TV’s huge set-up costs. Industry shows that there is another way – it has long been a talked-about show that no one watched. This season elevates it to another plane entirely. 
In part that’s because the writers, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, have taken the story beyond its season one and two confines. Initially, it was an insulated tale of five graduates battling it out for a permanent job at a major investment bank: who would win the day, and what lengths would they go to? 
It was classic battle royale territory, brilliantly peopled with privileged characters with generational wealth set against barrow boys and upstarts. But it came with obvious limits. Series two, therefore, began to show not how you got a job but what that job entailed. Dodgy deals with duplicitous financiers. Compromises and conscience-scraping to shin-up the greasy pole. All fuelled by the glint of filthy lucre. None of it, however, went too far beyond the trading floor of Pierpoint & Co, Industry’s gleaming, monolithic, fictional British-American investment bank. 
Series three is therefore a breakout season in several senses, principally because we follow Harper (Myha’la) to another job at an ethical investor, Yasmin (Marisa Abela) into a family scandal with her disgraced publishing mogul father and Robert (Harry Lawtey) into the murky embrace of the British Establishment. The show has grown in scope and ambition, while never forgetting its roots as a stylish workplace drama. Taking any show “beyond the precinct” is always a gamble, and normally a mistake. 
Here, it pays off handsomely. Venal characters continue to behave egregiously, swathed in financial jargon, but Industry is more outward-facing now, as if the writers have decided to go all out with a big swing. Both major new characters are doozies – Game of Thrones’ Kit Harington as a posh eco-entrepreneur called (literally) Sir Henry Muck; the ever-reliable Sarah Goldberg (Barry) as Harper’s new boss  – and more real-world events have been woven in, including the ramifications of Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget in September 2022. 
Pierpoint, like many firms with dubious histories, is going all in on ESG businesses, with the magnificent, baseball-bat wielding Eric Tao (Ken Leung) leading the charge – but is their sudden interest in the environment driven by the profit motive as usual? And then what happens when our masters of the universe come into the orbit of some even bigger fish, and suddenly the bank itself looks brittle? 
As a whole, Industry has become a study of the wider world of London finance, and money more generally. Given that money is what makes the world go round, that makes the show feel universal. It is just as cool and confident and brazen (and sweary and explicit) as before, and yet considerably more significant. If Succession needed an heir, then here it is.
 Series 3 of Industry begins on BBC One on Tues Oct 1 at 10.40pm; full box set available on BBC iPlayer on same day