In the first episode of the third season of “Industry,” which premières this weekend on Max, a new character is introduced to the show’s ensemble. “Industry” focusses on the British office of a fictional investment bank called Pierpoint; the wide-open trading floor, crammed with desks and Bloomberg terminals, is the center of the action. The newcomer is a young woman named Sweetpea Golightly, played by Miriam Petche, who stands in the middle of the floor filming herself with her iPhone. “So this is a morning in the life of a sales and trading graduate,” she says to her social-media followers. “Shout-out to all my corporate girlies!” She’s approached by Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela), a slightly more senior Pierpoint employee and one of the show’s protagonists, who incredulously tells Sweetpea that she can’t film there. But Sweetpea is doing her job, in more than one sense of the word—she’s working as a bank employee and also performing as one online. It’s an early signal that the show is of and for the TikTok era, a time when the hustle is not just corporate. Later, it emerges that Sweetpea also runs an OnlyFans account: she has no compunction about commodifying herself in the same way as any of Pierpoint’s financial products.
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