Across eight hours there is some absolute bravura television here.

Good news: season four is even better, truly top-tier television that’s surely destined for end-of-year lists, a serious feat when we’re barely a week into January.

You may not always like what you see, you may not always know what they’re saying, and you may not always like how you feel. But in the end, the season’s honest appraisal of their new world and our persisting one is so clear it’ll send you soaring.

Potential for wildly divergent paths in the meta arc of the show. One is that “Industry” rises from the ashes to become bigger and more ambitious than ever, joining the upper tier of HBO’s roster. The other is that, without its distinct angle and grounding ballast, “Industry” tips over into grandiosity, never quite establishing a sound basis for moving past such a natural endpoint. Over eight episodes, Season 4 hews much closer to the former end of this spectrum than the latter.

Although there’s never the sense that Industry is holding itself back, the wider canvas that Season 4 operates on suggests that the series could continue to evolve to keep up with reality's increasingly unbelievable events. Industry may share similarities with previous HBO dramas, but it's evolved into a definitive show of the moment.

“Industry” has produced what is perhaps its most conventional season yet—a tale of corporate intrigue in which Harper works to uncover the fraud and extralegal tactics that have allowed Tender to thrive. The righteousness of her crusade means that there’s less of what I think of as the show’s signature effect: a simultaneous awe and nausea at the characters’ Machiavellian maneuvers. .... In most respects, though, “Industry” still feels like “Industry.”

My main problem with the new run, though, isn’t that there are many moments of sheer implausibility but that we have seen it all before. .... And once the pyrotechnics stop what are you left with? A sense of having a fun time but with quite a lot of rubbish too.