Industry Season 4 arrives on HBO on Sunday, January 11, 2026, marking the show’s most dramatic reinvention yet. With the iconic Pierpoint trading floor gone, surviving graduates Harper and Yasmin are thrust into a high-stakes global power game against a disruptive new financial force. The creators and cast confirm this season is darker, funnier, and deliberately pushes the boundaries of what the series can be.
A Radical Rebirth for the Series
The fourth season represents a fundamental shift for the HBO and BBC drama. The final shots of Season 3 showed Pierpoint’s London office shuttered and covered in tarpaulin after an acquisition, seemingly closing the door on the world audiences knew. For creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, this destruction was not an ending but a liberation.
“Writing yourself out of a corner is a great creative challenge,” Down stated. “But there’s no corner you can’t write yourself out of, especially in our world.” They seized the opportunity to explode the show’s setting. “We were writing about one world, and at the edges of that world were other worlds, like media and politics,” Kay explained. “With Season 4, we were like, now we don’t have a trading floor, we can actually just go into those spaces.”
The narrative now revolves around Tender, a splashy fintech startup described as a “bank in your pocket,” led by the enigmatic Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella). This move allows the story to weave in elements of investigative thrillers, conspiracy dramas, and even what Kay calls a “neo-Gothic period drama in a big house”. The season is described as a “globetrotting cat-and-mouse game” where the pressure of money and power warps the already twisted friendship between the two lead characters.
“I honestly think there’s no point in doing anything if you’re not going to take a risk,” said creator Mickey Down. “I’m sure some people will be like, ‘What the fuck are they doing? It’s supposed to be set in a bank!’ But this show is whatever the fuck we want it to be.”
The Surviving Duo: Harper and Yasmin’s New War
Myha’la and Marisa Abela return as Harper Stern and Yasmin Kara-Hanani, the only remaining members of the original graduate class. Their dynamic remains the series’ core, but it is strained to its limits under new professional pressures.
Harper is working at Otto Mostyn’s fund but feels controlled and squeezed out. “She’s anxious and eager to find a way out,” Myha’la explained. Her potential escape route is SternTao, a professional alliance with her former mentor, Eric Tao (Ken Leung). “Harper loves control. It’s all she’s ever wanted,” Myha’la said, noting the new venture allows her to build a team she trusts. Simultaneously, she is pulled into the orbit of Tender’s Whitney Halberstram, a move fraught with new risks and alliances.
Yasmin starts the season married to tech founder Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington), but it is a miserable union. “She is not only a wife, but essentially a caregiver to someone who resents her for needing her care,” Abela revealed. Professionally, Yasmin finds a new path within Henry’s company, proving herself useful in a way she rarely has before. “There’s a moment of glory… where Yasmin proves herself to be very useful,” Abela said.
The success of one woman now directly threatens the other. “Yasmin and Harper are at the opposite ends of a big line and one’s success is the other’s imminent failure,” Myha’la described. “It feels like a race to the end for them both.” Abela has teased the season as “the most high-camp, crazy villain origin story of all time”.
New Faces in a Wider World
Season 4 introduces a significant roster of new characters, expanding the show’s scope into tech, media, and politics. Max Minghella joins as Whitney Halberstram, Tender’s ambitious CFO. “Whitney enters the world of Industry brimming with ruthless ambition, a silver tongue and a mercurial past,” Minghella said. He forms a complex, central relationship with Kit Harington’s Henry Muck.
They are joined by Kal Penn as Tender’s other co-founder, Jay Jonah Atterbury, described as a “giant sophomoric frat boy and a business savant”. Kiernan Shipka plays Hayley Clay, a fearless executive assistant at Tender who “wears many masks”. Charlie Heaton is Jim Dyker, a financial journalist with a burnt reputation willing to cross ethical lines.
Other key additions include Toheeb Jimoh as Kwabena Bannerman, a laid-back trader with a different approach to Harper, and Amy James-Kelly as Jennifer “Jenni” Bevan, a Labour government minister who clashes with Henry Muck.
The influx of new talent has energized the set. “Everyone who’s come on has been a fan of the show,” Myha’la said. “It gives us all so much more to play with.” Max Minghella acknowledged the pressure, saying, “I felt a genuine pressure to deliver for [the fans] and not tarnish this season.”
Testing the Limits of Likability
A recurring theme in the build-up to Season 4 is the conscious decision by the writers and actors to make their characters increasingly flawed and morally questionable. “Yasmin and Harper have done some pretty unforgivable things, and we’re testing the limits all the time,” Marisa Abela stated.
Abela finds this narrative freedom refreshing, especially for two young female leads. “We’re showing people how exciting it can be when it’s done well… and knowing that people aren’t going to have a problem with forgiving flawed female characters,” she said. “I think that’s where studios get it wrong. They’re afraid to make a character unforgivable.”
This applies to the new characters as well. Toheeb Jimoh, whose character Kwabena works with Harper, hinted that fans will find it “harder and harder to defend some of these characters we’ve all fallen in love with”. The season doesn’t just test the characters’ limits but also asks how much complicity and darkness an audience can accept from the people they watch.
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Behind the Bold Pivot
The radical change in Season 4 follows Industry’s own journey from a cult favorite to a recognized hit. The first season had modest ratings despite strong reviews. It was Season 3, which creators Down and Kay wrote as if it could be the last, that became a breakout. “We said to each other, let’s just swing as hard as we can for the fences,” Kay recalled. The gamble paid off, leading to HBO’s quickest renewal for the series yet.
The production design reflects the new tone. The sets for Tender’s headquarters were built to have “an edge of danger,” according to production designer Simon Rogers. “Like if you bash into a wall, it might cut you.” The visual inspiration draws from paranoid 1970s thrillers like All the President’s Men and The Parallax View, signaling a shift from the intense internal politics of a bank to a wider, more systemic conspiracy.
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