The setting is a gleaming glass tower in London’s central business district, but it would be hard to find a darker workplace than the hellhole that is Pierpoint & Co. The fictional investment bank is the bleak and confronting base for the dramaAn enterprise perpetually in the throes of frantic activity, it’s the caustic and possibly vengeful creation of writer-producers Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, both escapees from the rough-and-tumble of the finance industry.
At Pierpoint, people dress in smart suits or silk shirts and pencil skirts, and treat each other horribly. Everyone is struggling to hold on to their jobs and claw their way up the ladder in a place where nothing is secure and everyone is expendable. Bullying, bluffing, backstabbing and betrayal are routine. Relationships are transactional. The way in which characters talk to each other can cut like a knife and the language is profane.
It would be hard to find a darker workplace: Yasmin Kara-Hanani and Robert Spearing in Industry, season 3.The first season of the series, which is mostly shot in Wales, opens with the arrival of a clutch of keen recruits. Leading the pack is the often-inscrutable Harper Stern , a black American expat who lies about her qualifications in order to secure a position.
While all of that’s in play, issues of race and class are woven through the drama. Denizens of the English upper class are awful, although the ambassadors of new money aren’t any better. Everywhere, though, people like Harper and Robert are outsiders. At the outset, the series effectively introduces its key characters and establishes a framework and tone. But, despite the frenetic activity at the trading desks, in bedrooms, boardrooms, mansions, swish restaurants, pubs and clubs, little has changed since.Early in the third season, Harper, sporting a radical haircut to signal a new chapter, is employed by a different company and separated from her mentor, sometime accomplice and sometime tormenter, Eric Tao .