The Adults Aren't Alright
HBO's Industry and the asymmetrical drama of the millennial workplace
Over the past ten years there has emerged a stereotype about Millennials that is so well-defined and so pervasive that I don’t even have to explicate it here. More than for any other generation there is a kind of standard-issue sketch of “the Millennial”, a default character to which every real Millennial can be compared. Whether or not one accepts this sketch as accurate, every discussion about or depiction of this generational cohort begins with the assumption that it is supposed to be comprised of people who are entitled, victimized, and addicted to their phones.
The ubiquity of this stereotype (on Time magazine covers, in workplace harassment debates, at Thanksgiving dinner) may be part of the reason why there has been so little compelling art about millennials in the workplace. Most of the major films about young people of my generation have taken place outside of the office, and the major office films I can think of from the past few years (Sorry to Bother You, Bombshell) have concerned either Gen X-ers or “old millennials” who have dodged the worst of the chronopolitical flak received by people born in the early 1990s. The most famous television show about the office is, well, The Office. Few writers have been ambitious enough to chart a course between outright acceptance of the Millennial stereotype and self-righteous criticism of that stereotype.
That drought has ended with HBO’s Industry, a drama that follows four recent college graduates as they intern at Pierpoint & Company, a major bank in London. The brilliance of the show is that underneath its HBO-standard sex and drugs, it makes what amounts to a deeply forceful cultural argument: the workplace conflict between young people and old people, it argues, is the fault of the old people. What at first seems to be an intra-generational show about disparities in privilege and entitlement ends up being an intergenerational drama about the asymmetry of corporate culture, a narrative of power struggle in which the interns are just pawns in a much larger game.
The first episode (directed by Lena Dunham) opens with a montage of the main characters’ job interviews, one in which the show’s protagonist, Harper Stern, says she wants to join Pierpoint because she believes it’s “the closest thing to a meritocracy there is.” She and her fellow interns attend an induction speech, get a hard-knocks intro to the trading floor, and promptly start doing drugs and crushing on each other. The main motor of the plot, we’re told, is the eventual Reduction in Force (RIF), an end-of-internship eval wherein half the interns are offered jobs and half are sent home.
At first, then, the tension of the show seems to be which of the grads will “make it on RIF” and which will not. Their respective class backgrounds, career expectations, and temperaments are brought to bear on this question. Harper is an American state-schooler who forged her college transcripts; Robert (described as a “whole snack” despite weighing 100 pounds and having a receding hairline) is a working-class upstart with a drinking problem; Gus is an entitled Etonian who plays home-wrecker to one of his coworkers; Yasmin is a privileged globetrotter with a deadbeat addict boyfriend. Their different backgrounds cause them to take very different approaches to distinguishing themselves in the workplace—so far, so good.
Except that’s not what the show’s about. As Harper, Robert, and Yasmin stumble into a messy, Euphoria-esque love triangle (Gus gets shafted by the plot and mostly walks around smirking at people), the lens widens to include the line managers and executives who supervise them. These superiors, who at first present as side characters or comic relief, are actually the prime movers of the show’s plot: they decide whether the interns will get hired, and as a result they can manipulate, misuse, or ignore the interns however they please. Robert pins his hopes on Clement, a Financial Times-reading dinosaur who represents “the old way” of doing things at the bank; Gus finds himself hounded by the bank’s general counsel after the intern next to him dies during an Adderall binge; and Yasmin is harassed and held back by her very unprofessional Irish line manager. Harper, the soul of the show, finds herself caught in a tug-of-war between two bosses: Eric, a foul-mouthed vice president played to perfection by Ken Leung, and Daria, a quiet but crafty desk leader.
It’s easy to miss it if you focus on the financial jargon, but by the midway point of the show, the plot has little to do with banking. The narrative spirals away from stock trades and toward the legal-dramatic fixtures of the modern corporate workplace. There are nondisclosure agreements, ambiguous harassment complaints, desperate attempts at the retention of tokenized minorities, surveilled office romances, and an entire discursive matrix built around the extent to which a hangover manifests in clothing and body odor. There’s even a Christmas party. In all these cases, the adults who are pressing for an NDA signature or sussing out the viability of a harassment claim have their own agendas: they too have a vision for what the bank’s culture should look like, and they use the interns as instruments to bring that vision about. At a certain point the battle between the adults almost eclipses the main love triangle: one of the subtlest and most powerful scenes in the show is the one in which Daria triumphs over Clement: the trading floor watches the old fossil slouch off into a mandated early retirement while Daria babbles into her headset about exchange-traded funds.
Granted the world of banking is important to the show’s aesthetic stakes. It’s hard to lose sight of the fact that these lost twenty-somethings have an outsized role in steering the global economy. For eight to ten hours a day, in between Tinder dates or trips to the pub, they control enormous sums of money with little to no supervision, closing massive currency trades or conducting market research that influences major investment decisions. (The social scenes are festooned with quarter-zips and puffer vests as if to press home the point that finance bros are people too.) The show gestures at this chafe between little lives and big money when it has two main characters reflect on their personal lives while a speech from Fed chair Jerome Powell gurgles in the background, or when one character pulls a drug-fueled all-nighter to finish a pitch deck for the kind of overvalued startup that dominates the new economy.
And yet when one executive observes in the show’s finale that Lehman Brothers was once a dry-goods store, the implication is that the central conflict of the show could happen in any industry, not just in high finance. Setting the drama at a bank like Pierpoint may allow the writers to raise the stakes, structuring subplots around drunken work trips to Amsterdam or £50,000 bonuses, but the big question—who gets to be a victim?—is one that will inevitably emerge in any corporate setting where two or more generations have to coexist. At its heart Industry is about the machinery that adults have constructed to manage, flatter, and suppress the demands of young people. The interns on the show are not without fault or agency, but the conflicts they find themselves in are much larger than they are and existed prior to their arrival. If it hadn’t been them, it would have been someone else.
This is the show’s final comment on the post-iGen, post-MeToo sketch of the Millennial cohort. The interns at Pierpoint are participants in a generational culture war, but they are cannon fodder, not commanding brass. As millions of young people have entered the workplace, the corporate world erected a vast system of legal and behavioral policies to deal with the fact that these young people and their bosses have very different ideas about what is acceptable. The assumption inherent in this system is that young people either are victims or perceive themselves as victims, thus the corporation must protect them from misconduct and protect itself from liability at the same time. What Industry argues is that you cannot have it both ways. The show takes in the whole panorama of the contemporary workplace—the HR labyrinths, the stalled diversity initiatives, the puffed-up rhetoric of empowerment—and says, at the bathroom sink or over a boss-monitored Slack, that it smells a rat.
Clement is an MD and Daria is a VP that reports to him, that's a key point in the show. In most shops on Wall Street: Partners > Managing Directors > Vice Presidents > Associates > Analysts > Interns