When they decided to take on age verification in their latest season, Industry cocreators Konrad Kay and Mickey Down didn’t anticipate the issue would become such a political football.

“It was in the ether of British politics, but it wasn't front and center when we started writing the scripts or shooting it, and then it really flared up as a kind of front-page-of-BBC topic of conversation,” Kay says.

Season 4 of HBO’s sexy and darkly funny financial drama, premiering Sunday, continues Industry’s expansion beyond the cutthroat world of investment banking into tech, porn, age verification, and politics. As the season begins, there’s fighting amongst the top brass at Tender, a fintech company that’s recently gone public, over whether or not to continue processing payments for Siren, an adult platform akin to OnlyFans. While Siren and other gambling and porn companies make up a good chunk of Tender’s revenue, some Tender executives are spooked by threats of sweeping new age-verification laws and anti-porn rhetoric coming from the UK’s Labour Party and feel there’s more to be gained by cleaning up their act.

In reality, the UK’s Online Safety Act requiring people to verify their ages before they can view porn and other restricted content, came into effect in July 2025, long after Kay and Down came up with the storyline for Industry’s most recent season. Still, it’s had similar impacts to those felt by Siren. Pornhub’s UK traffic dropped by almost 80 percent in light of the regulations and it’s facing similar challenges in the US, where half of states have enacted age verification laws. In December, members of Congress considered 19 bills aimed at protecting children and teens online, though critics have said some of them are unconstitutional.

“It’s kind of shown how fragile free speech absolutism is,” says Down, describing the “wildly different” opinions on the issue, from puritanism even within liberal enclaves to a censorious “shut everything down” approach from conservatives.

While Industry has been a bit of a sleeper hit for HBO, it finally seemed to break through during Season 3, with its viewership for the premiere up 60 percent compared to Season 2’s premiere. Season 4 builds off that momentum very effectively, and feels more prescient than ever.

“We've got the OnlyFans piece and then we've got the fintech piece, and then we've got the fraud piece,” Kay says. But then, “in the back half of the season, we got the ascendant face of authoritarianism in the UK and the US.”

The new season spends more time with junior banker and part-time OnlyFans model Sweetpea Golightly, who keeps her face out of her adult content, but who nonetheless has her identity exposed without her consent. It’s a more nuanced look at what happens to modern online sex workers, who often get portrayed on TV in far more black-and-white terms.

“She started Season 3 being like, I'm an empowered woman. I have this OnlyFans account. I never leave money on the table. In Season 4, we're looking at what it looks like when that begins to shift,” Down says. “It can be empowering and exploitative.”

In fact, almost every character in Industry is both empowering and exploitative, depending on the circumstances. And while the latest season is particularly newsy, the most enjoyable part of the show can be watching them peel back those complicated, and often unsavory layers.

Last season followed publishing heiress Yasmin, played by Marisa Abela, as she dealt with the fallout of her Epstein-like father’s disappearance—for which she was arguably partly responsible—and contended with the extent of his abuse. Despite having been subjected to his predatory nature since childhood, Yasmin also uses other women around her, a pattern that continues in Season 4, as she navigates her new marriage with old money aristocrat turned failed tech bro, Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington).

“If she is Eve, she's bitten the apple and she knows that men can and will exploit women, and for a long time she has tried to deny that part of herself,” Abela explains. But having gone through major failures with work, friendship, and romance, she feels “she's not got that many lives left.” If she wants to win, she thinks, she’ll need to play by her father’s rules.

While Succession was a clear satire of the ultra rich, Industry feels murkier, and at times even aspirational. Even the liberal cocaine use depicted can feel glamorous, or at least cool, until it’s not.

Down and Kay met at Oxford and worked at banks in London. They know first-hand the addictive nature of wealth and power. Blowing lines, while true to those circles, is also one of Industry’s core metaphors.

“Our show is, in some ways, a celebration of this world, and also a kind of polemic against it. You have to seduce people into wanting something to show them that actually wanting it is maybe detrimental to their character and personality and to their life,” Down says. “Cocaine is just that in a nutshell.”

Rattling off other finance-based hits like The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short, he notes that typically the first couple of acts—filled with sex, drugs, and money— make finance “look cool.” But inevitably, there’s a “come-to-God moment where you realize it’s actually hollow.”

That reckoning is well underway in Industry's latest season, but unlike in real life, it’s a lot of fun to watch.