History Series / Industry

* ChronicBackstabbingDisorder: A number of the cast have this habit, but Harper doing this forms several major plot points. First she ousts Daria to reinstate Eric, then she costs Eric his biggest client by favouring a newcomer, getting him ReassignedToAntarctica, [[RuleOfThree and then]] she dupes Rishi into a bad trade to help her big client. Her last move is to turn on Pierpoint itself, attempting to find new work elsewhere - but even that results she and Eric betraying Danny and Rishi in order to secure a new team at Pierpoint when the move doesn't work out. This ends up being AllForNothing when [[spoiler: Eric finally turns on her, presumably as delayed recompense for her earlier betrayal of him, bringing Rishi back into the fold and exposing Harper for faking her college transcript all the way back at the start of the series and getting her fired, leaving the audience to assume Eric is poaching Jesse Bloom as a client from her as well.]]

* OffTheWagon: Rob falls into one when he discovers his old mentor Clement has passed away.

* DoubleStandardRapeFemaleOnFemale: Averted - when [[spoiler: Venetia admits to Kenny that Nicole sexually assaulted her, he takes it seriously - as does Danny. She also tells Yasmin, and though Yasmin tries to minimize it and get her not to tell anyone Yasmin doesn't imply it couldn't have happened because Nicole is female. While the characters have differing reactions to it, no one suggests it's less serious or different because the prepetrator is female.]]
* DoubleStandardAbuseFemaleOnMale: Downplayed, but when [[spoiler: Rob admits to Danny that he knows preying on clients is a pattern with Nicole he characterizes his relationship with her as consensual. Danny doesn't ask whether he felt coerced into it, though there's clearly an unequal power dynamic at play between he and Nicole given that Nicole could just withdraw her business and have someone else cover her if Rob does anything to displease her. This exact problem crops up later on - Rob no longer wants to do business with her after what she did to Venetia, but she offers a trade big enough for him to get more attention for his career. Ultimately he caves to the pressure and takes the trade.]]
* EasilyForgiven: Eric seems to forgive Harper incredibly quickly for costing him Felim as a client and getting him ReassignedToAntarctica, even seeming to misplace some of the blame on newcomer Danny. [[spoiler: Turns out this isn't actually the case come the end of season 2 when he reveals her forged university transcript.]]

* AlternateCharacterInterpretation: At the end of the series [[spoiler: Eric is back in control of a team and Harper is exposed for providing a forgery for her university transcript, resulting in her getting fired. Assuming Eric did this, did he do it solely as revenge for her costing him his biggest client and getting him ReassignedToAntarctica? Or was it because she confessed about unintentionally committing insider trading and he felt she would be a liability, especially when she admitted she would rather bury it happened than have to go back to New York? Or was it because he felt she is too volatile to trust as a trader (their conversation right beforehand having Eric admit he paid her hotel expenses when she was hiding from going in to the Pierpoint office) whereas he knew he could rely on Rishi? Or was it because he would have taken the New York deal but knew it couldn't work without Harper (and her client Jesse Bloom), since she has no desire to return to her home city so he pretended he didn't want to relocate either while making a pragmatic decision to remain at Pierpoint while regaining control of his team and ousting her for good measure? Or some mix of all these factors?]]

* TheChainOfHarm: In the first season Kenny puts graduate Yasmin on the spot by demanding she pitch an idea, then belittling what she comes up with. Come the second season she does the exact same thing to another graduate, Venetia. It's implied she does this because she's jealous that Venetia has the guts to stand up for herself and point out expecting the graduate to do a salad run is inappropriate. [[spoiler: This becomes much more depressing when it extends to how Yasmin handles Venetia telling her Nicole sexually assaulted her - at this point Yasmin has compartmentalized being forced into a lapdance and having a colleague force himself on her, resulting in her basically telling Venetia to pretend it never happened and think of her career as a whole, like she did. She later apologizes for this when called out by Kenny, but the damage is done at that point.]]

* TheGamblingAddict: Never explicitly stated but certainly seems the case with some of the Pierpoint staff and their clients, most notably Harper and Bloom. Harper is noted as 'always having her foot on the accelerator' and making big, risky plays and she suspects Bloom is the kind of client who wants to be on the edge of whatever is new and different.

** Rob to Nicole. He calls her out for groping his colleagues and himself and she minimizes it as 'getting handsy'.

* TheChainOfHarm: In the first season Kenny puts graduate Yasmin on the spot by demanding she pitch an idea, then belittling what she comes up with. Come the second season she does the exact same thing to another graduate.

* TookALevelInKindness: On the flip side of the coin, Kenny returns to work in season 2 kinder and even apologises to Yasmin for how he treated her in season 1. He and Danny are the only ones who [[spoiler: take it seriously when Venetia reports Nicole having sexually assaulted her.]] Gus also - he begins working under an MP and begins to care about her constituents, who she'd been ignoring.

* WhatTheHellHero: A mutual one near the end of Season 2. [[spoiler: When Venetia reports Nicole groping her, she first goes to Yasmin who all but states she should bury it for the sake of her career. This gets back to Kenny who calls her out - and she calls him out in turn for having paid for her to get a lap dance she clearly didn't want back in Season 1]].

* ChronicBackstabbingDisorder: A number of the cast have this habit, but Harper doing this forms several major plot points. First she ousts Daria to reinstate Eric, then she costs Eric his biggest client by favouring a newcomer, getting him ReassignedToAntarctica, [[RuleOfThree and then]] she dupes Rishi into a bad trade to help her big client. Her last move is to turn on Pierpoint itself, attempting to find new work elsewhere.

* ChronicBackstabbingSyndrome: A number of the cast have this habit, but Harper doing this forms several major plot points. First she ousts Daria to reinstate Eric, then she costs Eric his biggest client by favouring a newcomer, getting him ReassignedToAntarctica, [[RuleOfThree and then]] she dupes Rishi into a bad trade to help her big client. Her last move is to turn on Pierpoint itself, attempting to find new work elsewhere.

* TookALevelInKindness: On the flip side of the coin, Kenny returns to work in season 2 kinder and even apologises to Yasmin for how he treated her in season 1.
* WhatTheHellHero: Given the amount of backstabbing the characters do this happens a fair amount, but two notable examples are when [[spoiler: Yasmin calls Harper out for getting Daria fired, and her brother Mike calling her out because he felt she enabled her mother's abusive tendencies. In both cases she is criticized for being self-centred, though the latter case is made more complex by Harper also being a victim of her mother's abuse.]]

* TookALevelInJerkass: Most of the primary cast but very prominently with Yasmin, since she begins as shy in Season 1 but becomes more confident in Season 2, resulting in her using her new power to demean a new graduate joiner. She also [[JerkassToOne is especially abrasive to Kenny]], but he at least had gone out of his way to be cruel to her in season 1, with it being heavily implied he used the companies internal systems to send her inappropriate messages (which Yasmin was encouraged not to report).

* AbusiveParents: Various examples to various degrees across the series, but most noticeable with Harper. Her mother was so destructive both she and her brother ended up running away. [[spoiler: When Harper finally reunites with her brother, though, he feels just as much anger towards Harper as his mother for pushing him to excel at tennis, even though she was likely [[AmbiguousSituation very young at the time]], likely a result of displacing some of his anger at being abused onto someone he wanted to be in his corner. Harper equally hated that he ran away and left her behind and that their lives had revolved arounf his athletic success until then.]].

* ChainOfPain: In the first season Kenny puts graduate Yasmin on the spot by demanding she pitch an idea, then belittling what she comes up with. Come the second season she does the exact same thing to another graduate.

** Yasmin is apparently of Arab descent while she's into women along with men it turns out.

** Gus is both black and gay, this is lampshaded by the President of Pierpoint London who suggests hiring a highly-intelligent minority would make the firm look good.

* IntimateMarks: Harper has tattoos on both her breasts, right under them, and on her stomach just over her vagina.

* Mr.Fanservice: Gus and Robert get their own share of shirtless scenes as well as occasional full-frontal nudity.

* CharacterTic: Felim Bichan has an odd habit of dipping his right ring finger into a glass of milk and tasting just that one drop and ignoring the rest.

* GreenEyedMonster: Non-romantic example. Daria is clearly jealous at how Eric pays attention to Harper and gives the graduate opportunities more senior members of the team don't get.

* IntimateMarks: Harper has tattoos on both her breasts, right under them and on her stomach just over her vagina.

* {{Jerk with a Heart of Gold}}: Eric Tao doesn't hesitate to hand out brutal put downs to people in full view of others. He does demonstrate a soft side, however, most notably with Harper. He takes her under his wing, shields her background from close scrutiny, and berates her only in private. He even gives her an enormous bonus just because he can.

** Gus is both black and gay, this is lampshaded by the President of Pierpoint London who suggests hiring a highly-intelligent minority would make the firm look good..

** Gus is both black and gay.

** Harper is a black woman.

->'''Eric:''' Pierpoint is the world's preeminent financial services institution; we expect you to behave like you have a stake in it. Act like an owner. Enrich your clients, enrich us, enrich yourselves. So look at the guy or gal next to you. Really look. Do you think you're better than them? Maybe you are. But half of you won't be here in six months.

** Sara is supposed to head Pierpoint's London office, but the [=MDs=] clearly have little respect for her and Bill Adler doesn't have time for her opinions and overrides her decisions. [[spoiler:Best illustrated when she mismanages an incident where Eric berated Harper, using it as an opportunity to get rid of him. The situation blow up in her face because she underestimated how much the firm values Eric and inadverdently puts Harper firmly in Eric's camp with her condescedning compassion.]]
** Daria is technically Harper's supervisor, but Eric takes direct charge of Harper's developement while going out of his way to freeze Daria out of deals and bad mouth her on the floor. She tries to fight back, but badly overplays her hand and unwittingly puts herself in an even weaker position within the company. [[spoiler:By the end of Season 1, Harper uses the leverage she gained from Sara's mismanagement of the Eric incident to bring Eric back into the fold while pushing Daria out.]]

* {{British Brevity}}: The first series has only eight episodes.

* [[{{ChekhovsGun}} Checkhov's Gun]]: Early on in the series Greg suggests someone let Yasmin know Bloomberg Terminal messages are monitored by managers. In the second to last episode it is revealed that her boss learned of her supervisor's poor behavior by reading these messages, and pressures her to keep quiet.
* DecoyProtagonist: Hari is set up as one of the graduates we'll be following throughout the first series. He's even prominently featured in advertising, such as in the page image. However, he works himself to death early on.

** Robert invokes this trope when he shows a picture in a corporate magazine in which a minority character had been edited into to Yasmin.