'Industry' Unlocks Profit from Undervalued Asset Kit Harington
"Do it in your head, fuckface. What did you read at Oxford?"
Kit Harington has not done much since Game of Thrones ended. His most prominent role was in Eternals, the Marvel flop that has already been memory-holed. If he was holding back for the right opportunity, he’s found it now. Harington as sketchy startup CEO Sir Henry Muck on HBO’s Industry is the perfect combination of actor and role, and a major contributing factor to why Industry is the best show on TV right now.
Industry, a hilarious and thrilling drama series about severely fucked-up investment bankers in London, is now in its third season. It’s being positioned as a major HBO Sunday night prestige series for the first time — a position it deserves, because it’s getting better as it goes, and it’s Succession’s successor. It’s not a Dad Show, but I love it and I feel compelled to write about it, and also I don’t have time to do both Dad Shows and a freelance Industry essay this week, so I’m combining them. Maybe I’m serving you Taco Bell at McDonald’s, but I hope you still enjoy it.
Harington has joined Industry for Season 3, and his presence is mutually beneficial for him and the show. He is by far the most famous person in the cast, which helps draw attention and shows that Industry is playing in the big leagues now, and he’s so good in the part that it will likely improve his career going forward in a meaningful way. It turns out there’s a lot more to this guy than just being Jon Snow. Industry creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay used to work in finance, so they know about the principle of value investing. They saw that Harington was trading at less than his book value from a creative standpoint, and their investment in writing great material for him has allowed them all to profit.
Muck around and find out
Sir Henry Muck is a British aristocrat who’s the CEO of Lumi, a green energy company. Through two episodes, Muck seems sincere in his belief that his company is contributing something positive to the world. Or he at least sincerely wants to believe it. But he also seems to be running a pump-and-dump scheme, maximizing Lumi’s share price in the short term so he can sell his shares for a windfall before the market realizes that Lumi’s books are cooked and its products don’t work. But he also seems to think he really has to fake it before Lumi can make it. As he says, more than one thing can be true at once. He’s a complex character with interesting motives.
But what’s not ambiguous is that Muck is a “posh cunt,” which he sarcastically calls himself in order to provoke Rob, the Pierpoint banker assigned to hang out with him while Lumi launches its IPO. Rob comes from a working class background. He’s an aspirant to the world of wealth and power Muck was born into, but he’s an outsider. He has no safety net, and he has to work for his money. So he can see Muck’s dilettantism for what it is. He understands that people will actually be harmed by Muck’s fecklessness. But Rob’s aspirations mean that Muck can use his upper-class position to hit back at Rob and remind him that he doesn’t belong and never will. Unlike Yasmin, who is from the same class as Muck and knows how to handle him, which is by psychosexually dominating him and making him listen to her pee.
Harington has a similar background to Sir Henry Muck. He is from an aristocratic family — “Sirs” going back to the 1600s. His father is a baronet, a title Harington’s older brother will inherit. So, as he says in his GQ profile, he’s met a million guys like Henry. If he had been interested in business instead of art, he probably could have been Henry. His life experience makes him the right guy for the part. He’s like the lesser nobility equivalent of David Chase casting Italian Americans from the New York metro area for The Sopranos.
Dad in the North
Harington gets to do things he never got to do as Jon Snow, and never would have gotten to do if he’d allowed himself to be typecast as solemn, brooding, morally pure heroes. Sir Henry Muck is, to borrow phrasing from Boy Movies, a weird little freak. And Harington is clearly having fun, which he very clearly wasn’t during Game of Thrones. The way he commands Rob to do math in his head and calls him a “fuckface” is one of the most pleasurable things I’ve seen on TV in months.
The best thing is that it doesn’t feel like he’s overtly being the anti-Jon Snow, playing the opposite of what people know him as. It feels like he’s playing Sir Henry Muck. It’s just an entirely different type of character that demonstrates that Harington has range and complexity.
If you like shows that are artistically challenging but highly rewarding, I can’t recommend Industry enough. It’s making me consider the world from a different perspective, which is pretty much the highest praise I can give something. It makes me understand why someone would want to be in finance for reasons other than just the money, though it’s inextricable from the money. “This is all smoke and mirrors, but it’s indivisible from reality,” Eric says. “So we make reality.” For these people, the market is the only thing that’s real, so having the power to move the market is like being God. And Industry does not think this is a good thing, but it’s making me understand this mercenary cynicism in a way that’s more subtle and resonant than any previous depiction of finance I’ve ever seen. If money is the measure of how much you exist, devoting yourself to doing the job that will earn you the most of it is the only rational choice. It will destroy your soul, but what other option is there?
-I’m going to keep plugging my Bad Monkey reviews on Episodic Medium. Please subscribe if you’re watching that show. Episode 3 went up yesterday, and it’s a good one.
-If you want more on Industry, I really enjoyed my new Substack friend the Schmear Hunter’s podcast episode about it. Give it a listen.
this is interestingly different than succession. There is only one "old money" primary characters and she is actually the only young one with a soul. Harper is a moral nightmare and Rob is Hamlet . I will argue this is a Dad show because Eric is my hero. He is torn between doing the right thing, doing the expected thing, and doing what he wants.