'Industry' Review: Battle of the New Recruits - starting today on HBO

The initial public offering of HBO’s “Industry” will likely be met with amused skepticism by those who actually work at a “pre-eminent financial services organization” like the show’s fictional Pierpoint & Co. For the rest of us, it won’t matter: An often exhilarating, eight-part drama centered in the City of London, the series presents a world that’s thoroughly believable, frequently appalling and fully enthralling. This is, in large part, because it doesn’t care what you know: Viewers are dropped into a maelstrom of numbers, jargon and deals and as a result will be swept up, and away.

The work of first-timer show creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, “Industry” is staffed with enough complicated characters to promote perpetual narrative motion. But for all its novelty—there are not, after all, that many shows about brokers, traders, bankers, clients, et al.—the series is structured on the most traditional of frameworks. It could be the military, it could be a sports team, it could be the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry: When diverse characters are thrust together with only one thing in common, the outcome is anxiety, drama and interpersonal warfare. The mission at Pierpoint is making money. The obstacles are frequently human.

Diversity is a dominant theme of “Industry,” the title of which may be a gag—what does Pierpoint make, after all, besides deals? The industry of “Industry” is the quality demanded of the 20-odd young people whom the company has brought in, as is its custom, to compete for full-time jobs amid the blast furnace of its sales floor. Pierpoint is a pure kind of meritocracy: If your ideas succeed at making money, the reasons other people hate you will eventually be overlooked. But it’s a grueling, nerve-gnawing grind—one character will be dead on the men’s room floor before the end of episode 1. It promotes an off-hours lifestyle of hedonistic abandon among its scurrying drones. But it also rewards initiative, intelligence and pluck, all the virtues exhibited by Harper Stern (Myha’la Herrold), the lone American intern, one of the few Black people in sight and a young woman whose backstory seems poised to bite her in the curriculum vitae.

She has been paired, as have all the new recruits, with an older, seasoned Pierpoint vet—in Harper’s case, Eric Tao (the charismatic Ken Leung). The pairing doesn’t seem random: Eric is not only a supervisor of color (and one with an American accent), but he’s also sympathetic to Harper’s various perceived handicaps at such a traditional bastion of pinstriped Britishness—her sex, her nationality and her state-college education at a place where the Oxbridgean snobbery is palpable.

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The first episode is directed by Lena Dunham (“Girls”), one of the myriad executive producers on “Industry,” and seldom has a show shifted stylistic gears so dramatically between its pilot and its subsequent installments (directed by Tinge Krishnan, Ed Lilly and Mary Nighy). Ms. Dunham’s approach is kaleidoscopic, even frenetic, in how it establishes not just the atmosphere of Pierpoint but the mental state of its new arrivals. It works, and very well, especially since the more conventional storytelling about characters and deals is then undertaken in a more sober fashion. Ms. Dunham’s introductory episode is electric. Much of that energy is sustained and, with luck, will be through what will undoubtedly be subsequent seasons of the show.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/industry-review-battle-of-the-new-recruits-11604611242 (subscription)