Will Season 4 Be the Moment HBO’s ‘Industry’ Breaks Through?

Industry has never suffered from a lack of confidence. From its earliest episodes, the HBO finance drama has moved like a show that knows exactly what it is: ruthless, allergic to moral clarity, and deeply uninterested in making any of its characters likable. Now, with the first trailer for season four out ahead of the series’ Jan. 11 premiere, the question is no longer whether Industry is good, but rather if this is finally the moment it becomes unavoidable.

Season four will center around Harper (Myha’la) and Yasmin (Marisa Abela) ostensibly on top of the world as their friendship once again threatens to implode under the familiar pressures of money, ego, and the desire to dominate.

The trailer suggests nothing less. In the little-over-two-minute preview, Harper and Eric (Ken Leung) are back in scheming mode, Yasmin’s carefully curated dominance takes a darker, more unsettling turn, and Sweatpea looks visibly wrecked, marked by bruises, blood, and a smashed mirror.

Critics have already done their part. Season three of Industry earned a 2025 Critics Choice nomination for Best Drama Series and topped The New Yorker’s Best TV Shows of 2024 list. By any traditional metric of prestige television, Industry has arrived. And yet it still exists just outside the monoculture in a way that other HBO dramas like The White Lotus, Succession, and Apple TV’s Severance do not.

That gap matters, especially within HBO’s ecosystem. Does Industry even need mass appeal to validate its success, or is its resistance to accessibility part of its design? Unlike The White Lotus or Succession, Industry offers little in the way of comedic release or easily digestible archetypes. Those shows come complete with weekly discourse and viral moments. Industry, by contrast, demands attention and patience. Its dialogue is dense, its characters largely unsympathetic, its stakes often blurred through financial language that assumes attentive viewers.

Season four arrives at a moment when television success is increasingly measured by scale, not substance. Industry has the cast, the acclaim, and now the global scope to push into a wider conversation. Whether it wants that visibility, or whether it’s content remaining a sharp, uncompromising outlier, is still unclear. What is clear is that the show isn’t bending to meet the audience. If it does breaks through this season, it will be because viewers finally caught up, not because Industry softened its grip.

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