This piece contains spoilers for Industry Season 3.

Even by the standards of an inherently stressful show like HBO’s Industry, Sunday night’s Season 3 finale was an absolutely diabolical doozy, the kind of conclusion that makes you sit up in your seat and yell at the screen, “Holy ****!!!”

Scrappy and utterly ruthless trader Harper (Myha’la) managed to claw her way into a partnership with a mega-powerful and equally unscrupulous financier while scratching everyone in her path. Try as she might’ve to avoid it, socialite Yasmin (Marisa Abela) stepped fully into her fate by getting engaged to the man-child tech billionaire Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington, aka Jon Snow), breaking Robert’s heart in the process. And time was finally up for managing director Eric (Ken Leung), as he was told by Pierpoint & Co.’s CFO that “there’s no business need” for him now that the company’s been bought by Egyptian investment firm Al-Mi’raj.

Robert (Harry Lawtey) and Yasmin (Marisa Abela).

Simon Ridgway/HBO

hide caption

toggle caption

Simon Ridgway/HBO

Advertisement

From the beginning, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay’s Industry has explored familiar – though no less enticing – prestige-TV themes around survival in a cutthroat workplace and ever-compromised morals among the filthy rich and those aspiring to be filthy rich. It’s often somewhat lazily compared to Succession, and has sometimes courted or at least acknowledged the comparison. (Eric to Rishi in Season 2: “Any particular reason you’re dressed as Kendall Roy?”)

But Industry is in its own lane, pulpier and seedier than the classical overtures of the Roy family, and Season 3 really leaned into the muck for the better. In the sixth episode, frenemies Harper and Yas engaged in a scathing war of words which climaxed in a ferocious exchange of slaps; it was a long time coming, and the daggers they hurled at one another were top-notch, Dynasty-esque, worthy of a primetime Shonda Rhimes melodrama.

And in the finale, Rishi (Sagar Radia), the uncouth Alpha-male trader who’s emerged from the show’s periphery, suffered the bleakest of consequences, for an out-of-control gambling addiction: His estranged wife was murdered right in front of him by the loan shark he’s indebted to.

In fact, death loomed over this season in several ways. The most protracted and melodramatic among them was the ripped-from-the-headlines plot concerning Yas’s repulsive dad Charles, whose character appears to be drawn from the bios of both Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s media magnate father Robert Maxwell. The series cultivated an air of suspicion surrounding Charles’s disappearance from the party yacht, doling out the details of what occurred in piecemeal flashbacks over the course of several episodes.

Yas was on the yacht with him that day, despite claiming to want “nothing to do with him” at the end of Season 2 once she learned about his pattern of inappropriate affairs with younger women. (Including her childhood nanny, a teen at the time.) Maybe, as she very guiltily “joked” to Robert at one point, she killed him; or maybe, like the British tabloids suggested, she’d helped him hide out to avoid dealing with the consequences of his embezzlement. In the end, Yas didn’t push Charles overboard that yacht, but she did watch him drown without trying to save him. That’s dark.

This is the kind of sweeps-week storyline (remember those?) that could elicit groans for seeming cheaply manipulative, but Industry is a show where everyone and everything is connected and no relationship, no matter how unhinged, is superfluous. Harper’s presence aboard the yacht and her knowledge of what went down adds color to their rocky history as former adversaries at Pierpoint and on-and-off again friends; it’s meaningful that one of the show’s most unabashedly opportunistic characters cared enough to keep Yas’ secret.

Which is why it’s poetic (and disappointing) that Yas ultimately wound up getting engaged to a version of her father – Henry, like Charles, was accused of sleeping with his employees. The continuous comforts of material luxury and guaranteed financial security proved too alluring to relinquish. One of Industry’s most engrossing recurring subjects is generational divides – and their limits. The show is an early depiction of Gen Z in the corporate space, and characters’ actions show that for all the relatively progressive ideals of youth, the influence of elders (and capitalism) is strong.

Myha’la as Harper.

Simon Ridgway/HBO

hide caption

Advertisement

toggle caption

Simon Ridgway/HBO

Meanwhile, Eric spent much of this season lecturing the younger cohort in his orbit – former mentee Harper, Yas, and even millennial Rishi – about “ethics” and the very dangerous risks they were taking in the business. Yet this is the same guy who intimidatingly carries a baseball bat around the sales floor, does coke with his direct reports (he hooked up with Yas’ lawyer!), and on more than one occasion has exploited and sabotaged his colleagues to stay afloat at Pierpoint.

When he admonished Harper for treating everyone, including Yas, as collateral on her road to domination, it was refreshing to hear Harper make plain Industry’s M.O.: “Everything you do on the floor communicates an ideology that people are a means to an end! I enact your philosophy and you have the nerve to come into my office and call me a bad person?”

They’re both right, of course. And that’s the beauty of Industry, which has been mercifully renewed for a fourth season. It’s a show less concerned with characters who are easily “likable” or “despicable.” What matters is they are individuals with clear ambitions and unique strategies for getting what they aim for – and this makes them endlessly watchable.

Fight Night begins with a sinister host emerging from the shadows of a set resembling a boxing ring. “Friends, voters, audience, lend me your ear,” he intones, evoking a much older play about the perils of picking leaders.

Five actors materialize. Or rather, candidates. One is a young Black woman with stylish, scarlet hair that matches her turtleneck sweater. One is a middle-aged white man, short and grumpy. Another white man is Kennedy-handsome, tailored and lean. A white woman wears a surprisingly short skirt and a semi-transparent blouse. A Black man with long dreads smiles cheerfully. Over the course of the next 90 minutes, they appeal to audience members to choose them.

Each audience member is given a small device that allows them to anonymously vote for the candidates in different rounds and answer questions that range from age, to income, to qualities most valued in a leader.

Fight Night premiered to great acclaim at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2013. It’s toured the world since then, with performances in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Russia, Australia and Hong Kong. The current U.S. tour includes upcoming stops in Durham, N.C., Minneapolis and Santa Barbara, Calif.

Angelo Tijssens plays the sinister emcee and is part of the Belgian theater group Ontroerend Goed. The group created this show, under the direction of Alexander Devriendt, after a real-life political crisis that paralyzed the country.

“We spent 541 days without a federal government in Belgium,” Tijssens told NPR. In 2007, a right-wing Flemish politician named Bart De Wever won a popular TV quiz show called The Smartest Person in the World and became unexpectedly powerful. Forming coalitions turned out to be nearly impossible for a period during De Wever’s rise.

Tijssens and Devriendt became fascinated by entertainment’s influence on democracy. “And as humans always do, thinking that this was very specific to this point in history, we started reading and found out it wasn’t,” Tijssens said. “The Greeks had already written about the dangers of politicians being too popular.”

They decided to create an ambitious show about democracy in general, rather than about specific issues, such as housing, or social reform, “or climate, or abortion rights, or everything else I’d really like to talk or even shout about,” Tijssens said. “But just about – how does the system work, and how easy it is to be influenced.”

Like theater, he pointed out, democracy needs people to show up in person.

In Fight Night, there’s a frisson to being manipulated by the actors, whose speeches are purposefully vague. “I certainly hope daredevils vote for me,” says one earnestly. “Those who dare to dream big. Because that’s what we need in this society.”

“I think of all voters equally,” announces another. “You may disagree with me but that’s okay, because I want to talk to all of you. Tonight, it’s the majority that determines how this evening goes.”

At one recent performance in Ann Arbor, Mich., the rowdy crowd was primarily made up of students (61% between the ages of 18 and 24, according to the data supplied by the devices.) The audience cheered and groaned and whistled as candidates gave their speeches.

Outside the theater, tables were set up, encouraging people to register to vote in the upcoming, real-life election. The program noted that the performance had been updated “to correspond to the changing political climate,” but Tijssens said the themes of the show are as old as western theater traditions and democracy, dating back to the ancient Greeks.

“It’s been there all the time,” he noted. “So it didn’t really have to change a lot. I think the show can still go on for another – but I’m being very modest now – 20 centuries.”

Edited for radio and the web by Jennifer Vanasco. Produced for the web by Beth Novey. Produced for radio by Chloee Weiner.