HBO's Industry Is Proof of What Happens When You Let Shows Find Their Audience

Streaming Wars is a weekly opinion column by IGN’s Streaming Editor, Amelia Emberwing. Check out the last entry: I don’t think I’m ready for how badly Season 3 of Vox Machina is going to hurt my feelings.

For the 50th edition of this column, I went long about how eight-episode seasons are ruining television. Shows simply aren’t being given the time to come into their own anymore, with the majority of these hyper-truncated seasons trying to trim all “fat,” with that “fat” typically being the character development and exposition that ultimately makes shows great. Now, shortly after the publishing of that screed, HBO is proving what happens when you let shows cook. Even if said show is yet another abominably truncated eight episodes.

Earlier this week, Deadline published a report on Industry, a series about young and hungry finance majors fighting for their spot at the prestigious Pierpoint & Co investment company in London. The series just hit its highest viewership ratings yet in the third episode of its third season. This is noteworthy for several reasons, with the first being that a third episode of anything being its most viewed is essentially unheard of, but the most important being that when you let shows find their audience, they often will.

The nature of the streaming model as it currently stands means that these studios are throwing everything at the wall to avoid subscriber churn — even now that they’ve shifted their goals from increasing subscriber numbers to profitability after investors realized that a high subscriber count is less meaningful when the market is so diluted with competition. This is the direct cause of how many shows are debuting in a given year, making it damn near impossible for these series to find their people.

Industry’s first season had a middling reception, with the collective consensus basically being “it’s fine.” Many thought the slow burn was too slow, and others were simply disinterested in following a bunch of finance kids sort out their lives as they fought their way to the top. Season 2, on the other hand, went from middling to extremely well-received, with the critical consensus sitting at 96% on Rotten Tomatoes (with the average among those ratings being an impressive 8.4/10). And Season 3’s ratings continue to grow.

That growth isn’t just because the show was given time to develop, either. When studios invest in shows, it’s also their responsibility to help it succeed in whatever way they can — not just for the creators’ sake, or the viewers’ enjoyment, but for their own pocket books. For Industry, this meant a release day shift between Seasons 2 and 3 that has worked wonders for the series. In moving from Monday to Sundays, the series has expanded its reach and found an even wider audience. You know who wins in that scenario? Everyone.

Perhaps that is the compromise here. If studios must limit shows to these hyper-short seasons with inexplicably long hiatuses (there is no reason for a show like Industry to have a two-year gap between each season), then they also have to give them time to grow and find their audience. This is a thing that they could do in one season if they would simply make said season as long as it should have been in the first place, but hey, I’m not paying their bills. Still, it’s around Season 4 where actors' contracts typically get more spendy, so, y’know… the studio — and storytellers — could still explicitly benefit by simply making these seasons as long as they should have been in the first place.

All the background bits and bobs aside, Industry — a series that frankly, on paper, seems dull, annoying, or both — is a show that debuted in 2020 and continues to find its audience four years and three seasons later. While the opportunity to grow as it has isn’t one that every show should be granted, imagine what would happen if more of them were? I, for one, would love to finally get past the “watch all eight episodes of this show when they drop at once in the first 45 days or else the show’s getting cancelled” era. Mediums are meant to shift and change throughout the ages, but that whole model isn’t an evolution, it’s a regression, and it ripped us right out of the second golden age of television.

Amelia is the entertainment Streaming Editor here at IGN. She's also a film and television critic who spends too much time talking about dinosaurs, superheroes, and folk horror. You can usually find her with her dog, Rogers. There may be cheeseburgers involved. Follow her across social @ThatWitchMia