Industry.

I watched the first season of Industry a few years ago. I remember liking it, finding it kind of cutthroat, not really understanding what was going on at their job, but getting a sense of how impossibly dire everything was constantly becoming. I’d been watching Veep around the time of the election, but after the results, I needed to watch something with Black people in it — I don’t know, I guess I was mad at how things turned out (as were many people, obviously) and mad at how in the Year of Our Lord 2024, White supremacists still determine who’s in power, no matter how many other groups of people live here and have invested in this country we all live in.

So I needed a more diverse show or at least a more Black show, and while Industry isn’t a Black show, per se, it does have a Black protagonist, Harper (played brilliantly by Myha’la), who is completely unhinged and almost always making enormous mistakes, and yet she has enough of a backstory and enough quiet moments for her to feel like a person still (albeit a person willing to stab anyone in the back to get what she wants). Harper is wildly selfish and yet not quite unlikeable. Toxically ambitious and yet you want to see if she’s going to be able to pull it all off. She’s also not the only non-White person in the show—there’s Rishi and Eric and others who all are competitive in their own ways and all have enough glimpses of their humanity shown to the viewer for things to somewhat balance out. Their backgrounds are secondary but still gestured at from time to time, landing the show somewhere much more interesting and nuanced than color blindness or performative inclusivity.

I just finished the second season of Industry—watched it years after the first season—and the writing was impeccable (I leave the captions on when I watch TV because the nerd writer in me loves to see good dialogue). There is a standard HBO amount of sex in the show, so if that’s not your thing, be forewarned, and a standard HBO quality of production and moodiness. I have no idea of the details of what the characters do for work (I think they’re stockbrokers?), and because this is a workplace drama, most of the time I have literally no idea what they’re talking about, but it speaks to the acting and to the writing that even though I could not tell you what half of the stakes were in detail, I can tell you that I was holding my breath.

I’m going into the third season now, and I find it really refreshing that in the midst of what is an incredibly full season in my own life and generally a busy time of year, you can watch someone else’s chaos unfold and be for a while almost diffused of your own busyness. The plot unfolds and the plot unfolds, and here we are, still kicking.

Image: Max