All the best television features people in terrible systems being terrible to one another, so “Industry” season is the most wonderful time of every other year. Mickey Down and Konrad Kay’s extremely brutal, extremely British drama is the year’s, if not the decade’s, most devastatingly precise read on the financial, social, legal and (a)moral forces that rule our world.
For this inaugural entry of Power Ranking, we’re going classic with an exhaustive rank of every sad sack in Season 4. It wasn’t easy, because everyone on “Industry” is in various states of total crisis at all times and have very little power at all. This is a marginal game about marginal gains. But here we go anyway, unless you didn’t recognize that previous sentence, in which case please stop reading and go rewatch Industry.
(Note: I only included characters who were part of the season’s main storyline and had some sort of arc, so no Little Cousin Dolly, Lily Tao, or the former Mrs. Candace Tao.)
18. Jim Dycker
Dycker is dead (the ultimate L), and therefore dead last. Even if he wasn’t, he would still be here just for being so damn stupid.
His fate is all the more embarrassing because it’s not like he’s a complete idiot. He’s smart enough to know that the Tender brass are capable of doing anything to avoid scrutiny. But instead of taking his own advice to be careful, what does Dycker do? Accept tainted coke from a sinister assassin and go to a second location with him and Rishi Ramdani of all people. Goodbye, Jim. We hardly knew ye.
17. Rishi Ramdani
It pains me to put Rishi, the king of background dialogue (“He’s a limp-dick analyst, but he has a view.” “Rob, you look like a goofy wanker who buys NFTs. Any color?” “I once walked in on my parents fucking. I shook my dad’s hand and said, ‘Go easy on her, yeah?’”), this low.
On a show full of falls from grace, Rishi’s is perhaps the most chilling. Reduced to a coke dealer to povvo dives and Harper’s insider trading mule, he meets his narrative end when he leaps from the balcony of the apartment where he and Dycker have been blowing lines in a botched attempt to either kill himself (again) or escape from the police. His true intent is left ambiguous, but his legs are definitively mangled. It’s all quite horrible. But really, it’s a meta mark of respect that Rishi went out with such a huge…splat.
16. Tony Day
Had Tony blown the whistle, would he still be going to prison? Or would he be dead? My money’s on dead: He knew too much, and doesn’t have the velvet handcuffs of aristocracy to protect him.
Now that he’s imprisoned, he may end up dead anyway. He’s too big of a possible liability, and who would even notice?
15. Lisa Dearn
Poor Lisa. Taking the fall for something she didn’t even do: not chic.
A real player might have gone scorched-earth and fought back, but all Lisa can muster is some mild snark directed at onetime protégé Jenni Bevan: “It’s been beautiful to watch you flourish, you Tory.” Cute. Maybe she can leverage her failure into a lucrative career in consulting.
14. Dycker’s editor
He ended the season alive and well and not in prison, but is ultimately a pawn in Harper and Yasmin’s games. With a gun to my head I couldn’t tell you his name, so this seems an appropriate place to slot him.
(In the interest of professionalism, I looked it up: Edward Burgess.)
13. Robin Williamson
Imagine one day you’re in the C-suite of a hot-shit tech darling, and the next you’re fired. By Yasmin Kara-Hanani, no less. A mortifying end.
Knowing Industry’s propensity to give disgraced characters a chance to get their lick back, this may not be the last we’ve seen of Robin. But for now, he’s a fired nobody, only above Dycker’s editor because at least he’s probably rich.
12. Jennifer Bevan
Once upon a time, Jenni was happy to have a direct line to Tender’s CEO and the attendant perks that afforded her. Now that everything’s come crashing down, she’s located her conscience.
She attempts to take back the narrative with an impassioned speech about how fraudulent behavior is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. She’s not wrong, but what she really wants is to lay the blame at society’s feet. As Yasmin points out, Jenni knew exactly what it meant to take a meeting at Henry’s birthday party. Had Tender been a legitimate business, Jenni would still be indulging her slimy marriage of convenience with the Mucks.
The whole thing stinks of the excuses-disguised-as-sharp-analysis of why real-life journalist Olivia Nuzzi entered inappropriate relationships with male subjects, then wrote a poorly-sold book and tried a comeback tour. Yes, we live in a society, but so do plenty of journalists who don’t fuck their sources. The handwringing over whether Nuzzi or macro forces were responsible for her transgressions ignored her real victims: the Americans who will get sick and die under the anti-science regime her reporting helped usher in.
But I digress. Jenni’s morality attack has her raring to go straight to the prime minister when Henry alerts her to the Russian forces behind Tender. She’s not-so-subtly forbidden to take the bait, leaving her exactly where she started — a toothless naïf who still believes she can change a poisoned system from within.
11. Jonah Atterbury
Without Jonah, Sweetpea would never have cracked the Tender case in Accra, Harper would never have been able to back up her short, and SternTao would likely have gone bankrupt instead of profiting $110 million. Whitney also did Jonah a solid by kicking his ass out the door before shit really hit the fan, affording him a freedom of movement that none of the other Tender guard have.
That counts for something. But not much.
10. Whitney Halberstram
Whitney’s innate power is undeniable. Only someone with genuine gravitas and force of personality could have taken the Tender grift as far as he did. He’s a shapeshifter with an uncanny sense for who people need him to be, a cipher whose nothingness is the source of his strength.
Was that funeral home story even real, or was he testing whether Harper was a real freak? Is Vytautas Andriulevičius just a second pseudonym obscuring the real man? Was Tender once a legitimate business turned target, or was Whitney in the Russians’ pocket from the start, just looking for the right setting to unspool his plans? We’ll never know.
And his impact is undeniable: Whitney’s shenanigans are the rotted core of this season, the reason we’re all here.
Unfortunately, he is also completely expendable. The Russians were happy to let him rule his little roost as long as it served their interests. But when you’re a peasant, it’s compliance or curtains for you, doll. Where are he and his synthetic wig now? The last-frame flash in the finale suggests that he made it to Lithuania. With the Russians after him, how long will he really stay gone?
9. Hayley Clay
Called up from the escorting minors to act as sexual weaponry, Hayley’s made the best of a bad situation. But when Whitney laughs in her face at her demand for $500,000, she realizes her options may be more limited than she thinks. In America, being a former assistant to a fugitive criminal CEO would be a compelling hook for an influencer career, parlayed into the halls of new money. In Britain, no such mobility exists. So Hayley turns to Yasmin, the devil she knows.
Hayley may serve a friendlier master now, but she’s kidding herself if she thinks her new career nets her anything other than a higher likelihood of meeting a premature demise. She’s only this high on the list because honeypotting for a not-very-smart madam she might possess kompromat of seems better than being dead, disgraced, in jail, or hunted by the Russian government. These are the kinds of hairs I’m splitting here.
8. The Russian goons
I’ve watched enough mafia movies to know that Dez Watkins’ (the fixer who killed Jim Dycker) and Ferdinand Schwarzwald’s (Whitney’s spooky handler with the berries-and-cream-adjacent haircut) security is tenuous at best. They do possess the power of life and death, though.
7. Kwabena Bannerman
Man, whatever. Having gainful employment (for now), no threats on his life, and being born into a posh enough station to have gone to school with Yas places Kwabena pretty high on this list. But who actually cares about Kwabena? Nobody, not even Harper, whose finale confession only underscores his irrelevance. She’s lost everyone who actually matters to her, so what’s the harm in trying out an emotional-intimacy guinea pig who will never hold the power to break her heart?
6. Eric Tao
Now that SternTao is $110 million in the black, Eric should be able to recoup his daughters’ inheritance and have a soft landing into retirement. Pretty good end for a serial sex pest.
I fully expected Eric to betray Harper and tank the Tender short to save himself, but “Industry” affords him one last autonomous act. Leaving SternTao felt like his last-ditch attempt to save what little is left of his soul, shredded to bits after terrorizing subordinates, cheating on his wife, knifing DVD, firing Kenny, shanking lifelong friend Bill Adler, and shirking all non-financial responsibility for his daughters. It might be the only truly selfless thing we’ve ever seen Eric do.
Alvin America Tao is home, alone, probably still ignoring Lara and Lily, wallowing in the wreckage he’s made of his life. Still, he chose the end of his story, and the end of his story is money. There are worse ways to go.
5. Yasmin Kara-Hanani
Don’t get mad. This isn’t a morality ranking.
In Yas’ mind, she’s doing exactly what Harper did when she founded SternTao: Creating her own business. Yas may have descended to the lowest rung of hell, but if we’ve learned anything from the Epstein files, it’s that hers is a viable venture, especially if you have no compunctions about cozying up to literal Nazis. On the flip side, one wrong move and Yas just might meet the same fate as her father.
4. Sweetpea Golightly
Smart, newly rich, white, blonde, beautiful, and free of any criminal or legal entanglements, the delightful Sweetpea is doing pretty well for herself. One of the sharper minds on the show, Sweetpea is the key to substantiating SternTao’s Tender thesis. By season’s end, Sweetpea has proven her value. Sure, she had to take a beating along the way, but in the face of a $2 million payout, was it worth it? Maybe. For now, she appears to be the only character whose grit and savvy can match Harper’s. No easy task.
3. Henry Muck
To some of us (povvo dives), Henry is pathetic. He ends the season having lost his wife, his job, his family’s fortune, and under house arrest. He is perennially coddled, literally held up by godfather Otto Mostyn to catch a fish, Lord Norton ready to finish the job with a massive net.
Nor is Henry driving his own bus. He sleepwalks into his addictions, into Whitney’s warm embrace (even though he knows early on that something’s off with the guy), into the world Yas tries to build him. His only real moment of agency comes when Whitney’s Lithuanian passports shock him out of his stupor.
But who cares? As “Industry” reminds us over and over again, this is Britain, where your story was written hundreds of years ago and cannot be altered. And so Henry Muck is untouchable. He is landed gentry. Aristocracy. To the manor born. No matter how much money he’s lost, how much cocaine he snorts, or how much lithium he’s on, nothing and nobody can ever change that. He is an Englishman.
2. Harper Stern
The beating heart of “Industry,” Harper Stern has finally gotten a win. A real win, one that no one can take away from her. She’s also located her red line. I question whether she would have pushed back on Yas so hard without that $110 million in SternTao’s coffers — this concrete, material success affords her the space to step back and take the kind of moral stance she never had time for before — but she has it, so she did.
With her own firm, a somewhat competent and loyal staff, and a Patrick Radden Keefe profile in the works, Harper is the best-positioned to enter Season 5 on top. But probably not for long — I’m still waiting for that Forbes 30 Under 30 curse to kick in.
1. The institution
Pierpoint may be described as “the institution,” but the real institution of “Industry”? Alexander Norton, Otto Mostyn, and Moritz-Hunter and Johanna Bauer. To them, the comings and goings of everyone else on this list are just so much noise.
Ensconced in their castles and mansions and family homes, they are the only people whose power is assured. Everyone else is playing on the board they built. They are the institution. The institution never suffers. The institution always wins.