Industry‘s Season 4 premiere dives headfirst into the debate around online age verification, with the London-set series introducing an Online Safety Bill that mirrors the UK’s own age-verification law.
‘Industry’ Season 4 review: HBO’s criminally underrated drama thrills in most ambitious season yet
The law instates age checks on sites with explicit content so that minors can’t use the sites. Ways of confirming a user’s age include facial recognition and banking information. Similar laws are going into effect in the United States and around the world, but experts have sounded the alarm on potential security and privacy concerns.
Age verification takes center stage in Industry‘s Season 4 premiere.
Despite art mimicking reality on Industry, age verification was less of the hot-button issue it is now when the show’s co-creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay began working on the season. While earlier, failed iterations of age verification had been floated in the UK in 2019, then in 2022, age verification only officially went into effect in July of 2025.
“We actually ended up writing about it and filming it before it became a thing in the UK, without any sort of consultant inside scoop on it,” Kay told Mashable in a video interview alongside Down.
That prescience winds up working in Industry‘s favor. Season 4’s emphasis on age verification proves the show’s ability to keep its finger on the pulse, even in the fast-moving digital age.
In Industry‘s Season 4 premiere, titled “PayPal of Bukkake,” the Online Safety Bill is the catalyst for a major shift at fintech company Tender. Once a payment processor for porn websites, including Industry‘s OnlyFans analog Siren, Tender plans to shift away from adult content in order to gain respectability.
Industry Season 4 dives deeper into online adult content.
Miriam Petche in “Industry.”
Credit: Simon Ridgway / HBO
This isn’t the first time Industry has explored the world of porn. Introduced in Season 3, Pierpoint grad Sweetpea Golightly (Miriam Petche) has a side hustle on OnlyFans. With Season 4, Down and Kay didn’t want to leave that thread dangling. In fact, they wanted to complicate their portrayal of her sex work.
“In Season 3, the picture is quite empowering for Sweetpea, and in Season 4, it’s depicted a little bit more like exploitation,” Down told Mashable. “I think that ambiguity is interesting, and I’m interested to see how audiences take to it. It was a 50-50 split in the writers’ room, but we were like, ‘Are we telling a story where it’s about a character who felt empowered to do something at a young age, who’s now feeling exploited by her own decision? What does that mean about her relationship with her own femininity and for female empowerment?'”
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Kay added: “The intersection of pornography, of cell phones, the commoditization of selfhood… All of that stuff feels very 2025 capitalism to us, so we ended up leaning into it all.”
Industry Season 4 peers deeper into government.
Amy James-Kelly in “Industry.”
Credit: Simon Ridgway / HBO
On top of building more character moments for Sweetpea, Industry Season 4’s focus on porn and age verification also allowed Down and Kay to further integrate the UK government into the season, especially as age verification has been a “political football” for quite some time, as Down put it.
“It was difficult to understand on what side of the political aisle people were on about it, because you had some right-wing commentary about why it was a great thing, and you had some right-wing commentary about how it was a terrible thing, because it was really about free speech and freedom of expression,” Down told Mashable.
In Industry, though, the Labour government is the one pushing the bill, which soon gets them embroiled with Tender.
“It felt like a great opening gambit for the Labour Party in Season 4,” Down said. “The Labour Party now feels like an ideologically complex and compromised institution to me, because they’ve come into the government with really good, highfalutin ideas, but they are backed with the same kind of hedge fund money and the same sort of media superstructure behind them that the Conservative government was, and that’s kind of what the season’s about.”
While it plays a big role in the premiere, much of Industry‘s discussion of porn and age verification takes a backseat to the meat of the season: What, exactly, is going on with Tender?
The bait and switch is something Industry has pulled before, introducing one big subject in a premiere before segueing into something new and unexpected.
“With Season 3, you come into it thinking it’s going to be about Lumi’s IPO, and it becomes about Pierpoint and its attitude towards its own destruction,” Down said. “Then [in Season 4], you think it’s going to be about the Online Safety Bill and pornography, and all that stuff continued in a thematic way, but it really was a jumping-off point to a story about the payment processor.”
There, Down and Kay weave a tale of yes, porn and digital privacy, but also of money’s role in government, of shady business dealings, and the rise of authoritarianism. It’s a dizzying ride, but Industry never loses control.
“It all feels like part of a capitalist puzzle,” Kay said. “Because these things, if you drill into them enough, there is overlap between all of them.”
New episodes of Industry Season 4 premiere Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max.
