“When you go down the laundry list of what they’ve done and what they did to get there,” cocreator Mickey Down says of his beloved characters, “they can be considered pretty heinous individuals.” But their savory deceit is why we watch. It’s why Industry has become The Show of the Season, the internet’s new meme-machine, drawing expected-but-flawed comparisons to Succession, another HBO supernova. Industry is a beast all its own.
All of these faces were different, but they were all linked by a similar kind of ecosystem, a similar kind of person having power and not having power, and all the negotiations that happened when people entered those systems. That makes sense.