Ex-bankers-turned-showrunners Mickey Down and Konrad Kay understand that the theatre of appearances has closed. Few shows read the current political and cultural zeitgeist as sharply as HBO’s Industry. The era of performative conscience is dead, and the polite fiction of institutional morality lies in ruins. What remains is capital, predatory and startlingly sincere in its ugliness.

Season four of Industry stretches far beyond the Pierpoint trading floor. We open to blue-blooded investor Otto Mostyn (Roger Barclay) telling our antiheroine Harper Stern (Myha’la), “woke is dead”. In Industry, woke never referred to radical politics so much as the corporate language of conscience that once hung in the air. The phrase crystallises the world Industry now inhabits: a landscape where institutions no longer hide behind virtue-signaling and optics, and where influence moves with a bluntness that earlier seasons only hinted at. If the series previously examined the moral contradictions of high finance, season four assumes those contradictions have already been internalised.

New arrivals cement this season as the most expansive and corrosive yet: Max Minghella plays Whitney Halberstram, the unnervingly affectless CFO and co-founder of Tender (his surname a nod to American Psycho); Kiernan Shipka plays Hayley Clay, an executive assistant whose faux-innocent exterior masks a ruthless survival instinct; and finally, Charlie Heaton is Jim Dycker, a dogged FinDigest journalist circling Tender’s rot.

At the centre of the season sits Tender, a payment processor dubbed “the PayPal of bukkake”, which services the sectors legacy banks avoid—most lucratively, the pornographic sector. Harper identifies Tender as grotesquely overvalued and ripe for destruction, and what follows is less of a market manoeuvre than an all-out war. Amid sprawling plotlines, the show focuses on the corrosive interplay of desire and power by using pornography as a metaphor for modern finance itself.

This idea comes into focus in a standout monologue from Heaton, which frames porn as a technology of instant gratification that ultimately hollows out our capacity to want anything real. The comparison lands squarely on Industry’s world of finance where rewards are immediate and consequences often deferred. In this age of indemnity, excessive risk is selectively tolerated—those with social or institutional privilege can act with impunity, while others are occasionally held to account. Season four moves beyond mere individual gambits to depict a system that legitimises pursuit while insulating the powerful from reckoning. Against this backdrop, the darkness of season four makes earlier installments feel almost buoyant, as woke is sidelined and survival hinges on ruthless pragmatism.

Harper and Eric’s alliance builds on their mentor-mentee history with a father/daughter dynamic, though it is never comfortably paternalistic. Both outsiders to the rarefied hierarchies of high finance clawed their way up without pedigree, propelled by sheer predatory instinct. Their past seasons, littered with calculated cruelties, mark them as proven sharks. Season four asks whether two such forces can truly synchronise their ambitions without devouring one another. Their partnership carries the charge of an “anti-establishment” defiance, a wager against the institutions that once shaped them. In a world where performative virtue has collapsed and woke posturing holds no sway, relationships are brokered through leverage and loyalty is a gamble. This makes the two-handers between Myha’la and Leung some of the season’s most delicate scenes, with both actors forging fissures of vulnerability in characters who rarely afford themselves softness. 

The beating heart of Industry may well be Harper’s entangled bond with Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela), her foil from a gilded world. Two leading ladies. Their connection defies tidy labels. Friends? Lovers? Enemies? Rather, a secret, more sinister fourth option. Their respective traumas anchor every decision this season. The narrative turns inward for Yasmin. Her marriage to Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harrington) framed a pursuit of stability and access. Her choices are not ethical lapses to her, but pragmatic necessities—calculations made to secure a place in a system that rewards proximity to privilege and punishes hesitation. Wokeness no longer mediates interactions, and performing morality offers no security. Abela’s performance renders these reckonings palpably human: Wide-eyed intensity and subtle humility make Yasmin’s internal calculus as compelling as it is morally complex. She adheres to no more woke pretensions in business or intimacy. The season’s unflinching realism hits harder than ever, stripping survival and self-preservation of deceit, and laying bare the stakes of control and desire through the collision of these two forces.

Where the season falters is in its Labour Party subplot, which lacks the bite of the main arcs and occasionally diffuses the show’s otherwise relentless tension. The political manoeuvring unfolds with a procedural distance that sits uneasily beside the season’s sharper explorations of power. By contrast, a more compelling, anti-woke Party asserts itself this season. Its presence feels symptomatic of the world Industry now depicts, one where institutions no longer trouble themselves to sanitise their interests in virtue or propriety. The Labour storyline, while comparatively subdued, underscores the lingering of traditional politics even as the show insists the real influence now operates elsewhere—private networks less constrained by morality or oversight. 

Industry’s fourth season strips away the cathedral that once sanctified greed. What remains is sexual, financial and political appetite, laid bare and unashamed. This instalment is bigger, darker, occasionally messier, but braver for it. Triumphs are never fully celebratory and losses are never fully redemptive. In this age of indemnity, “woke is dead”, and nothing sacred survives the naked pursuit of ambition.