Industry’s Worst Parents, Ranked
Spoilers follow for Industry through season three, episode six, “Nikki Beach, or: So Many Ways to Lose.”
In the second season of Industry, when Harper and Yasmin are on their full-of-familial-disappointment trip to Berlin, the former drops a Ja Rule quote: “Pain is loving.” But on a broader scale in the series, pain is parents. Our Pierpoint fuckups are fucked up because of their mostly absent, mostly terrible mothers and fathers, and their demanding bosses, melancholy mentors, and pushy clients are themselves bad at the whole “raising kids with care and love” thing, too. Every episode of Industry reiterates that cutthroat capitalism is a system that either eats its young or turns them into monsters, and this whole cast is generationally guilty.
Still: Even if one tries to hide behind a “nature versus nurture” argument, Industry’s parents and parental figures are inspired levels of awful. They fuck their kids’ nannies, shoot up heroin on shopping trips, and look at porn while spending time with them during the holidays, and that’s just three of the people on this list! And so, in honor of season three killing off two of the series’s greatest worst parents, we’re ranking Industry’s elders by awfulness. People are Pierpoint’s capital, but bad parents are Industry’s.
Greg’s mother
After Greg purposely runs into a glass wall during the Pierpoint holiday party in season one, he goes back home to recuperate, where his mom very cutely calls him “Greglit” when she calls him for “supper.” I don’t need to see this woman to understand that she runs a cozy home and showers Greg with love.
Daria
Daria actually seems fine. When her ex-colleagues at Pierpoint meet her again at another bank in season two, they think she’d left the industry, but no: She took 18 months of maternity leave to be close to her newborn child. At one point she said to Robert, “I don’t want to be a mother, especially to you,” but I don’t take that as any indication that she won’t care for her actual child — just that Robert was sort of a twat in season one. (Also, just a reminder that nearly every other country in the industrialized world except for the United States has figured out how to provide paid maternity leave!)
Petra Koenig
Petra seems like a very disinterested godmother to her boss Anna Gearing’s daughter Boadicea, and it’s understandable why. (“You asked me to be godmother. What was I gonna do? Say no? You employ me, Anna.”) But she shows some rare vulnerability when it comes to her son, who is struggling with substance-abuse issues. I’m dinging her for lying about spending time with her son as a way to get Anna off her and Harper’s back when they attend the ESG conference in secret, but how grossed out she is when Harper tries to use him as a bargaining chip between them felt like real emotion to me. A boundary-setting “We are colleagues” is a very valid response to your subordinate accusing you of being an addict and then, when wrong, very gracelessly trying to turn your son’s addiction into a bonding moment. Ugh, Harper!
Danny Van Deventer’s father
Yes, he was a professor who slept with DVD’s mother when she was his student. But they stayed together and DVD seemingly had a normal (if wealthy) childhood in the Upper West Side, so he can stay low on this list.
Diana
I sympathize with how overextended Rishi’s wife is, managing a country home she didn’t want and watching her husband’s gambling problem escalate. Infidelity in a marriage isn’t great, but little of her resentment about how her life has changed after marrying Rishi is directed toward their son Hugo, and Hugo isn’t old enough to understand that both of his parents are sleeping around, so … it’s sort of a wash? Diana is frustrated by how Rishi has diminished her into “some dull breeding machine you spunk into,” but I don’t think she would take that out on Hugo. Think of her warning to Rishi: “It’s much easier to raise strong boys than fix broken men.” Diana seems like she’d do all she could to raise Hugo right.
Candice Allbright
Unlike Eric, who spends two weeks at home with his family and is practically crawling out of his skin to go back to work, the “high up at Google” Candice is focused on their daughters. “These are formative years for our girls” is a very reasonable thing to say, but it’s hard when your husband can’t find any value in his personal life. However, there is a moment this season when Eric and Candice’s daughters are at Pierpoint and accuse Eric of forgetting about them, which makes me wonder if Candice dropped them off where Eric works as part of their splitting-time arrangement? Which feels irresponsible to do when Eric himself was not there at the time. Still, I know who I’m rooting for in the custody battle!
Reggie Muck
Henry’s father died by suicide years before his son created and then ran Lumi into the ground, and we shouldn’t judge that choice. But we can judge that Reggie’s only real piece of advice to his son seemed to be, “You’re born with a silver spoon in your mouth. People are gonna assume you’re an idiot” (which despite being accurate, isn’t exactly actionable), and that Reggie’s inner circle are pretty much classist jerks treating the U.K. like their own version of Oz they can manipulate from behind the curtain (suggesting that maybe Reggie was like that, too).
Clement Cowan
RIP to Clement, who wasn’t Robert’s biological father but was certainly our Welsh boy’s work dad, and I would argue a mostly not terrible one. Using heroin in front of Robert, of course, bad! But the advice he gave Robert about how to fit in at Pierpoint — he preached better clothes and better class-based code-switching — was useful, if inherently depressing, and his suggestion that Robert make himself “big in your own life” was important self-prioritization. I still think that his hand on Robert’s knee in their last meeting before Clement’s death was paternal, not predatory, and the 500,000 pounds he leaves Robert in his will was a supreme act of generosity. The heroin, though … not great.
(Tie) Otto Mostyn and Alexander Norton
Industry’s version of Succession’s Frank and Karl absolutely suck as people, and they obviously have their own agendas and initiatives for godson/nephew Henry that are not exactly altruistic. Think of Otto describing himself as a “troublemaker” and “bandit” like he’s some kind of geriatric Lost Boy and Alexander complaining about only having daughters; these men are exhausting. However, I must acquiesce that they’re pretty good to Henry? They pull every string available to them to get him off the hook for Lumi’s collapse, and they offer Yasmin exactly what she needs publicity- and protection-wise to keep her in Henry’s orbit. They’re helicopter father figures with sniper rifles pointed at any of Henry’s rivals, but they’re also supportive in a way that so many other Industry parents aren’t.
Bob Spearing Sr.
Robert’s father doesn’t seem as absent or as actively abusive as some of the other parents on this show; when Robert visits his dad at his bar, the two seem more unaligned than at odds. Bob doesn’t know Robert’s job or the details of his recent life, and the schism is seemingly because Bob has remarried and had two other sons with his new wife. That’s unfortunate negligence, and if Bob knew how much Robert’s mother, before her death, was “in your ear … about how you should be,” he should have done something to tamp down her toxicity. But until it becomes super-clear to what extent Bob knew about Robert’s mom’s emotional (and perhaps physical?) abuse, middle of the pack feels right.
Jesse Bloom
Jesse Bloom commits insider trading on live television while pretending to be texting with his son, with whom he lies about being “very close,” and lets his faux-daughter figure, Harper (whom he calls “Mommy”), take the fall for it. Mr. COVID really doesn’t let an opportunity pass him by.
Rishi Ramdani
Cheats on Diana while she’s pregnant, the night before their wedding. Cheats on Diana after she has the baby. Watches porn while holding Hugo, and lets his cocaine-caused nosebleed dribble onto his son. Gets the family deeply into debt because of his gambling addiction, and even bets the money his bookie gave him as a baby gift. As a Better Luck Tomorrow fan, I would never say “Actually, Rishi should try to be more like a model minority,” but I would love him to make some better choices.
Eric Tao, as a biological father
As a father of daughters, Eric’s really been making a mess of things as the series goes on. Gone is the man Harper spotted in the grocery store being adorable with his daughters. Instead, post-separation, Eric’s hurting them in direct ways, like forgetting details of his custody arrangement, and generally just being a skeeze: too much hair dye, too much cocaine, too much money spent on sex workers. Industry’s having a fun time with Eric’s downslide — like when he says he used to see his daughters in all the successful young women at Pierpoint and then gets a call from HR — but it’s a bummer to see him unravel so quickly.
Anna Gearing
She named her daughters Boadicea and Olympia, essentially cursing them to a childhood of being girlboss bullies and an adulthood of being pretentiously nationalist. Unforgivable!
Harper’s father
This man’s absence looms over Harper’s whole essence. Her statement to Yas that “at least you had the privilege of having a father to fuck you up in the first place” wasn’t really the most compassionate thing to say, given Charles Hanani’s recurring ability to find new ways of being an asshole. But Harper’s father’s MIA status has so clearly shaped her reflexive yearning for, and resentment of, older men in her life that we can’t ignore his debilitating influence.
Newman, Eric’s mentor
When this man was Eric’s boss, he nicknamed him with ethnic slurs — “all laced with affection, of course,” Eric says — and so messed up his sense of worth that Eric tells Newman’s widow he still “loved him” for getting “the best out of me.” You see so much of that messed-up dynamic in how Eric treats all his subordinates, from Harper to Robert to Yasmin, and Eric holding Newman’s “Make America Great Again” hat with something like grief is a real jump scare.
Gus’s parents
The parents who tell you one thing to your face and another behind your back. In the first season, when Gus is fulfilling his parents’ dream as an Eton and Oxford graduate, working at the prestigious Pierpoint, and lingering in the closet, things seem fine. The family even has their own book club! How domestic! But in season two, when Gus has left banking to work as a low-level government employee and college tutor, and is more open about his sexuality, his parents get his sister Sadie to pass along their talking points about him “throwing your life away” and causing “instability” in the family that will “kill them.” It’s all passive-aggression masked as concern, and Sadie’s parting shot of “They just want us to live up to their expectations. Otherwise, what else was all this for?” is particularly cruel. No wonder Gus left the U.K.
Harper’s mother
This woman is so disinterested in her daughter’s life that she only contacts Harper once in 18 months: to complain about her haircut. When Harper Stern, ruthless American capitalist and fucking bitch, describes another person as a “ruthless American capitalist” and a “fucking bitch”? You know her mother’s really gotta be both.
Robert’s mother
Oh, Robert. What did your mother do to you? Robert’s desperate-to-please energy comes off him in waves, and it’s resulted in his complete lack of boundaries. He lets everyone at work push him around, even allowing himself to be saddled with Lumi and then serving as the public face of Pierpoint’s failure in the ESG space. He drinks too much, parties too hard, and sleeps with too many women who don’t take him seriously. The only conversations we see Robert have with his father touch on how Robert’s mother pushed him into being a “restless” miniature version of herself, a theme that is brought up during Robert’s ayahuasca trip, too. And of course, there’s his distressingly Oedipal relationship with Pierpoint client Nicole Craig. Robert says that Nicole and his mother share an “unfillable void of need” quality, and both women have used it to mess Robert up.
Azar Kara
At first, Yasmin’s mother seems pretty reasonable. She should be able to speak Arabic in her own house, and it’s rude for Yasmin to try and control that. She is right that at Pierpoint, Yas will “need to work doubly hard to get half as far,” and her suggestion that Yasmin do something else with her life seems to come from a place of real concern. But when Yara decides to divorce Charles, her practicality no longer seems to involve Yasmin. She cuts Yasmin off for maintaining a relationship with Charles and never reaches out again — not when Yasmin becomes paparazzi fodder, when it becomes clear that Yasmin has run into money issues, or when tabloids suggest that Yasmin killed Charles. Of course it hurt that Yasmin essentially chose Charles in the divorce, but what kind of parent totally cuts off their child amid all this catastrophe? And while I’m not saying Yara should have to answer for Charles’ actions (all the settlements with random women, selling the publishing house for parts, squandering the family’s finances), I am saying that she probably knew about a lot of this while they were married, and didn’t warn Yas about any of it.
Eric Tao, as a work dad
Look at what Newman’s lessons have wrought! Eric initially tries to bond with new Pierpoint employees about their shared minority status (“People like us … born at the bottom”), but nearly without fail, he betrays or gives bad advice to nearly every younger person who trusts him (a trend that Daria and DVD both noted before he threw them under the bus). Other people he screws over: Harper, when he breaks their confidence and tells Pierpoint HR she didn’t graduate from college; Yasmin, whom he parties with, lusts after, and then fires; Robert, who gets some generic macho “I’m a man, and I’m relentless” advice and then has to sleep outside of their hotel room at the ESG conference when Eric books a sex worker, later assuming Robert’s identity so no one knows he paid for sex. He fires Kenny because Kenny saw him in a moment of weakness, although Kenny has grown into being a good leader on the floor; he dismisses Sweetpea’s concerns about the future of Pierpoint, even though she’s correct about how over-leveraged the bank is. Think of when he says to Yas, “You don’t have to compromise or degrade yourself to prove your value to me.” That’s a nice sentiment, but it’s also a lie from a man who is both impossible to trust and completely convinced of his own rightness. Has a man ever needed therapy more?
Nicole Craig
She’s assaulted three different Pierpoint employees, hid behind her money to get away with it, used Robert’s mommy issues to guide them into a sexual relationship and scoffed at the idea that he’s a victim, and raised a teen daughter who then, in her mother’s image, assaults Robert. I’m sorry Robert had to deal with more trauma by waking up next to her dead body after they spend a night together, but also, good riddance.
Charles Hanani
This list is not meant to advocate for murder, manslaughter, or negligent homicide. But when Yasmin says she thinks it’s a child’s “biological duty to kill their parents,” and you remember all the details of Charles Hanani’s awfulness — how he’s coerced Yasmin into craving his approval; the erection he sports during a meeting at Pierpoint with Yasmin and her boss, Celeste; how he cuts Yasmin off financially and mocks her for being a nepo baby when she confronts him about using his influence to sexually abuse women and father other children while married to Yara; saddling her with the bad press about his years of embezzlement; and attacking her physically while they’re on the yacht together … well. Congratulations to Yasmin for joining the good-for-her cinematic universe.