‘Industry’: One of Us! One of Us!
A show about billionaires and wannabe billionaires knows the secret to connecting with its audience.
NEW STANDARD DISCLAIMER: This newsletter aggressively spoils things.
When you’re one of those sad souls who decided to be a writer at the age of nine and never seriously reconsidered that huge life decision, one thing is absolutely true: You don’t understand money, never having had any1. By “understand money,” of course, I don’t mean paying your water bill and figuring out if you have enough cash left at the end of the month for a bottle of Mellow Corn—that I understand2. I mean the big stuff, like whatever equities are or whether or not Bitcoin is actually worth anything or if it’s just the Wizard of Oz furiously pedaling a bike that makes the lights almost come on and if there’s actually any difference between those two realities. That kind of money is a mystery to me3.
And to a lot of folks, I suspect, based on how many people are posting to r/povertyfinance and the general feeling that it should not cost 75% of your income to rent a studio apartment that was once someone’s basement laundry room4. Which should make a show like Industry difficult for me to access. It’s a show about hifalutin’ London bankers who do stuff like invest a billion dollars in currencies in a deal that will either end in their suicide or a profit of $18 million. It’s a show where a super-wealthy character calls a few million bucks “prosciutto money” in a tone implying amusement. It’s a show that throws around jargon and acronyms with wild abandon, most of which I don’t understand5. It’s a show where people regularly consume what looks like thousands of dollars’ worth of cocaine instead of spending that money on their crippling credit card debt or, yanno, food6.
And yet, I love the show (enough to be writing about it a second time), and I never feel iced out of it the way I would almost certainly feel if I knew any actual London bankers7. The reason the show feels so accessible to mopes like me who can’t comprehend the amount of money being bandied about in this show is simple: Anxiety. As in, every single character on this show, no matter how wealthy, is absolutely baking in it.
I’M A MAN AND I’M RELENTLESS!
Even the lowliest grunt working at Pierpoint & Co. probably makes more money in a week than I did this past decade8. That should make it hard for me to understand their problems, but the genius of the show is that everyone—no matter who they are—is a hairsbreadth away from total ruination and a future spent working at an Arby’s or something9. All of the main characters teeter on that edge: Eric (Ken Leung) is feeling his middle agedom and is always one bad day away from getting shit out of Pierpoint as a has-been; Yasmin (Marisa Abela) comes from money but her asshole father has more or less pissed it all away and her attempts to trade off her family name in the wealth management department haven’t worked out, so now she’s sweating out trades like everyone else; Harper (Myha'la) was just recently ruined and shat out of Pierpoint and is now purposefully clawing her way back (and will no doubt get shat out again soon enough); Robert (Harry Lawtey) is always on the very edge of being fired; Rishi (Sagar Radia) is in enormous gambling debt and can barely pay his bills—you get the picture. Despite all the paper wealth and power, no one on this show is secure. Even the posh fucks are always in trouble10.
And that’s why this show sings. I may not know what it’s like to earn millions of dollars in base salary every year, but I sure do know what it’s like to dread a ringing phone, or the cheery invite from your boss to come to their office, that stabbing moment of anxiety when you suddenly realize you have totally and completely fucked up something at work11, or can’t pay this month’s bills. Everyone knows this feeling. The only difference between my experience of them and the characters on this show is the scale of the terror.
Isn’t It Lucky That No One is Ever Satisfied?
IN some ways, this makes Industry more effective than Succession, a show it is frequently compared to. Succession succeeded on a similar basis—the Roy children were all damaged in ways that we poor folk could comprehend, giving us a way in to their monied world where inheriting a billion dollars is somehow a disappointment12. But those emotional beats were always slippery—if you didn’t have the same parental, abandonment, or sexual hangups as the Roy kids (or their elders, or all the other screwed-up people on that show) you might not have experienced the same kind of impact that other people did.
But who hasn’t sweated out money? Or a job performance review? Or a betrayal by a peer or a boss you thought of as a friend (or at least a friendly)? When Eric stares down a sense of irrelevance in the alpha, ultra-stressful universe of big money, almost everyone can feel the icy finger of death worming its way up our ass.
Honestly, I don’t think I’d do well as a rich person. If I won a billion bucks ($400 million after taxes I suppose13) you should all add me to your Death Pools immediately, because the odds will have gone up sharply that I will eventually be found naked in a bathtub covered in my own sick14. At least that’s how I convince myself that watering down my Mellow Corn is a way to live.
NEXT WEEK: Rebel Ridge and narrative trickery.
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My retirement plan is finding nickels on the sidewalk.
Best $9 you’ll ever spend!
Fine: The water bill is also a mystery to me. Who is using all this water? Certainly not me. I only drink whiskey and I bathe exclusively in car washes.
Basement laundry room! Laundry room! Fancy stuff. Fancy stuff that costs a lot of found nickels.
But which I pretend to understand, because I can’t stand anyone not thinking I’m the smartest man in the room, even though literally no one ever thinks I’m the smartest man in the room. Pretending to understand things is why I am currently the proud owner of 1,000 ButtCoins. Value: $0.
Admittedly, those two things may be related.
I suspect that if I did know London bankers I would be hiding from them 24/7.
Writing is not a glamorous life. For example, when I get a box of books from my publisher I am excited because I won’t freeze to death this winter.
The circle of life on the Internet goes like this: Someone tells you that ‘Arby’s’ is derived from Roast Beef and you spend the day in a daze wondering how you never realized that before, then you are informed that this is bullshit and it’s actually derived from the company’s founders the Raffel Brothers and you mourn that fact that the world is suddenly a little less magical.
That’s the secret of Industry: It’s a feel-good show, because everyone hates the rich!
While working as an editorial assistant in publishing I once approved an article to be published where the text had been corrupted so it was just a bunch of gibberish, and somehow I was not fired on the spot. I can only assume it was due to my handsomeness.
Because it’s not two billion, natch. Meanwhile my mother-in-law only sent me $25 for my birthday this year and I was in a funk for days. I had plans for that birthday money.
I DO NOT KNOW HOW TAXES WORK, EITHER.
And a lot of it, if I’m doing things right.
Geez, I hope Death uses a little spit on that icy finger...