Industry Season 3: Still the Best Show About Money

Industry has the strange distinction of being, simultaneously, the most critically acclaimed show on HBO for the last three years and the show HBO has most consistently failed to market. Created by Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, former London investment bankers themselves, Industry has spent three seasons quietly making the best television drama about money ever produced, and a large chunk of prestige-TV-consuming America has still not encountered it.

Season 3, which aired in August and September 2024, was the season that should have changed that. It didn’t quite. But a year on, with some distance from the weekly-review cycle, I think it is the season that confirmed Industry as a show the next decade of television writers will be studying.

The pivot Season 3 made

The first two seasons were about Pierpoint & Co’s London graduate cohort: Harper (Myha’la), Yasmin (Marisa Abela), Robert (Harry Lawtey), Gus (David Jonsson), and their bosses Eric (Ken Leung) and Rishi (Sagar Radia). The drama was, in its first seasons, primarily about the specific psychological toll of investment banking culture on young workers.

Season 3 pivoted outward. The graduate cohort was now senior enough to run things. The drama expanded to include Kit Harington’s Henry Muck, the charismatic founder of a green-energy startup called Lumi; Sarah Goldberg’s Petra Koenig, a financial journalist; and Sarah Parish’s Denise, an aristocratic Lumi chair. The plot moved onto the mechanics of an IPO gone wrong, the specific ways a “green” investment thesis can turn out to be financial fiction, and the precise choreography of corporate-governance collapse.

The show, across ten episodes, went from a workplace drama about young people under pressure to a systemic drama about how the system itself actually works. That is a hard pivot to execute, and Industry executed it almost flawlessly.

The Kit Harington achievement

Casting Kit Harington as a charismatic greenwashing venture capitalist was, on paper, a gamble. Harington’s post-Game of Thrones career had been, fairly or not, coloured by the perception that he did not quite have the range to play a character who was not a medieval king. Season 3 proved otherwise, and did so by giving him a role that weaponised his specific quality of performed earnestness.

Henry Muck is a man who genuinely believes he is saving the world, until he is not, until he is managing the losses, until he is lying to investors, until he is losing his company. Harington plays every one of those phases with a specific unstable charm that is both the character’s asset and his catastrophic liability. The performance is, to my mind, the most interesting work Harington has done, and it deserved more recognition than it got.

Marisa Abela’s season

Marisa Abela, having played Yasmin since Season 1, gets Season 3’s full dramatic arc. Yasmin, who started the show as the privileged graduate whose family wealth shielded her from the worst of Pierpoint’s pressure, is now a mid-level banker whose father is the centre of a public financial and reputational scandal. The season is structured around Yasmin’s slow, compromised attempt to protect herself while the family name collapses.

Abela plays the collapse with a specific brittleness that gets harder and sharper as the season goes on. The penultimate episode, which I will not spoil in detail, contains two scenes that are among the best screen acting of 2024, one in a bathroom, one in a boardroom. Abela is playing, across both, a person who has finally understood that the privilege she assumed would protect her is both the reason she was invited into the room and the thing that will be used to destroy her.

What Myha’la is doing, two seasons on

Harper was the protagonist of the show’s first two seasons. Season 3 begins after her firing at the end of Season 2, and much of the season is about her attempt to build herself back through a different, smaller, edgier trading platform. Myha’la plays the new Harper as a person who has learned from her destruction, and the specific thing she is doing is refusing to re-enter the world that chewed her up on the terms that world requires.

This is a hard thing to sustain across ten episodes. Harper is no longer the point-of-view character. She is the mirror. And Myha’la, as actor, has had to adjust her performance to the new structural position: less central, more watchful, less reactive, more calculating. The adjustment is clean.

Where the show is doing better than the news

The single most impressive thing about Industry Season 3 is how well it works as financial journalism. The specific mechanics of the Lumi IPO, including the technical reasons it collapses, are rendered with a level of operational detail that financial reporting itself rarely manages. Down and Kay are not dramatising finance. They are explaining it, through drama, to an audience that the news cannot reach.

This is why the show matters. There is a large public conversation happening about financialisation, greenwashing, and corporate governance, and most of that conversation is conducted at a level of abstraction that people who do not already understand the mechanics cannot follow. Industry makes the mechanics legible. Not always sympathetic, but legible.

Season 4

HBO has renewed Industry for a fourth season. As of mid-2025, it is filming. The word from the production is that the season will continue Season 3’s systemic focus while bringing the cohort’s personal stakes back into sharper view.

I will be watching. Industry is the show I would most want to recommend to anyone who wants to understand the current economic moment, and the show HBO most needs to figure out how to sell to them.

Watch Season 3 again if you have the time. Pay particular attention to the Lumi boardroom sequences. That is what contemporary capital allocation actually looks like, and we do not get to see it staged this well very often.