Industry (HBO): Could a TV Show About Investment Banking Be “One of the Best of the Decade?”

When Industry on HBO premiered in 2020, I watched the first few episodes, got distracted, and didn’t even finish Season 1.

If you’re not familiar with it, the show follows several young graduates who start working in sales & trading and investment banking at JP Morgan Pierpoint & Co. in London.

Over the seasons, they get promoted, switch firms, move to the buy-side, and struggle with challenges ranging from office politics to cocaine addictions.

It’s a fine premise, but Season 1 of the show didn’t grab me.

But I heard that Season 2 was much better and that Season 3 (which just finished in 2024) was so good that it turned Industry into a top-tier show.

So, I returned and watched all three seasons (24 episodes) over the past month.

I’ll answer three main questions in this “spoiler light” review:

1. Should you watch Industry?
2. What are the show’s strengths and weaknesses?
3. Will you learn much about the finance industry by watching it?

As always, I’ll start with my TL;DR version:

The Short Version: Why I Recommend Watching Industry

• I recommend Industry, and I agree with the consensus that it improves significantly in Seasons 2 and 3. The difference is so big that you could even make a case for skipping Season 1 or watching a recap.
• I do not think it’s in the “all-time top tier” of TV shows (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, The Wire, Succession, early Game of Thrones, etc.), but it is one of the best current shows.
• The show does character development quite well but sometimes struggles with implausible plots and a reliance on pointless sex/drug scenes and other “finance bro” tropes.
• The acting, production values, direction, music, and cinematography are all top-notch; my main complaints relate to the writing.
• You will learn about the finance industry by watching, but primarily the sales & trading and hedge fund side. The show gets a lot right but is far from realistic, and may not be easy to understand fully without having some finance background.

What is Industry About?

Publications like Vanity Fair have described the show as “Succession meets Euphoria.”

There are surface-level similarities to both: Coming-of-age stories, drugs, sex, parental issues, the drive to succeed in business, and plenty of politicking, backstabbing, and betrayals.

But the key difference is that Industry is mostly about each character’s individual journey in their career and personal life.

So, unlike Succession, it’s not a winner-take-all story; there’s no intrigue over who will get the CEO job.

Unlike Euphoria, it’s not just about social issues; all the characters have career goals and pursue different strategies to achieve them.

In Season 1, the “entry-level” characters are Yasmin Kara-Hanani (wealthy nepotism hire), Harper Stern (aggressive non-target hire), Robert Spearing (working-class Oxbridge graduate), and Gus Sackey (polished/wealthy Oxbridge graduate).

The show also follows senior staff at Pierpoint, such as Eric Tao (sales MD), Bill Adler (Head of FICC), and Rishi Ramdani (head execution trader).

The graduates compete for coveted full-time roles at Pierpoint, knowing that the majority will not get return offers.

Meanwhile, the senior staff compete for promotions, clients, and the ability to determine the bank’s strategy.

Why I Recommend Watching Industry

For me, a great TV show needs two main elements:

1. Layered, flawed characters that develop and become more interesting over time.
2. A surprising but logical story (i.e., everything makes sense in hindsight, even if it was shocking at the time).

Few current shows deliver these elements better than Industry.

To give an example of #1, initially, it doesn’t seem like there’s much to the character of Yasmin.

She seems to be the standard nepotism hire who’s clueless on the job, which explains why she’s relegated to food delivery duties for her desk.

Her main talents are stringing along men and leveraging her family’s wealth for everything.

But as the show progresses, she’s put into situations where she can no longer rely on these tactics, which forces conflict and change.

For example, one relationship makes her into the manipulated rather than the manipulator, which makes her reconsider her entire approach to men.

In another plot, she learns more about her family’s controversial past and must become more independent or face dire consequences.

There are twists and turns on a story level, but most events are “surprising” rather than “shocking.”

As one small example, the graduates you might expect to receive full-time offers at the end of Season 1 are not the ones who do.

There are reasons for each decision, but they’re not always the most obvious or straightforward ones.

The Strengths and Weaknesses of Industry

I described one of the show’s key strengths above: The characters become more complex and change significantly as the series progresses.

Another is the banter and “side talk” on the trading floor.

This dialogue is so great that I recommend turning on subtitles so you catch it all.

They also do a ton of research on the jargon to describe trades.

I even had to look up a few terms because I never worked in sales & trading and don’t know the terminology as well.

The performances are also stellar, especially for the seasoned actors on the show, like Ken Leung as Eric Tao and Trevor White as Bill Adler.

In Season 3, guest star Kit Harington delivers a performance far more impressive than anything he did as Jon Snow in Game of Thrones.

Finally, the production values are up to the usual quality of HBO and far above almost most of the junk on Netflix or Disney+.

In terms of weaknesses, I have several minor complaints and a more substantial one.

First, the show may be difficult to understand 100% unless you have a finance background.

They use a lot of trading jargon (e.g., “half a yard” and “axes”), and in later seasons, they freely use terms like EBITDA and enterprise value vs. equity value.

If you’re comfortable looking up unfamiliar terms, you can find plenty of articles explaining them. Just don’t expect many in-show explanations.

My second issue is that they really overdo the “sex and drugs” scenes.

Yes, I realize it’s par for the course for HBO, but many of these scenes feel like filler.

It felt like the writers said, “Well, dialogue about money is boring. Let’s have an orgy! Also, throw in cocaine.”

My main issue, though, is that many characters do not face the proper consequences for their actions.

This results in a show where parts are very realistic and other parts are pure fantasy.

To illustrate, I’ll describe an event from midway through Season 1.

One of the characters mis-books a currency trade, which results in her desk losing $40K.

Mis-booking FX trades is quite common because you can quote each transaction in two ways (ex: USD/GBP or GBP/USD), so this mistake is realistic.

The character then attempts to cover up their mistake by threatening the middle-office staffer who reconciled the trade and flagged the problem.

The middle-office employee laughs and tells them to fess up, but this character then turns around and holds the incorrect position in an attempt to recover from their losses… and ends up losing $150K in the process.

But then a senior mentor on the desk covers for them and makes the trade profitable by finding a willing client buyer.

An employee – especially a junior-level one – who did any of this in real life would be fired on the spot.

Mis-booking a trade is not the issue; lying about it and threatening full-timers is the problem.

Also, a senior trader would never “cover” for a junior trader in a situation like this, especially given the junior trader’s many other problems.

Will You Learn Much About the Finance Industry by Watching Industry?

My best answer is, “It gives you a good flavor of life at a bank, but don’t interpret the events too literally.”

Many details are accurate (e.g., everyone on the trading floor has a nickname), but the story outcomes are sometimes unrealistic.

One example is the trading fiasco I described above, but there are countless others:

• In one incident, a salesperson “tricks” a trader into executing a trade that would hurt the bank’s P&L solely to help a client – and a senior manager listens to the entire conversation and lets it go through. This would never happen in real life.
• A company with exaggerated/borderline-fake financials attempts to go public, and Pierpoint pushes the offering even though everyone looking at the company points out the problems. Yes, regulation differs in London, but I can’t believe an offering like this would ever go to market.
• One character in S&T attempts to move to private wealth management but does so by announcing the move to her desk and “splitting” her time. In real life, you make these moves behind closed doors, and there’s no such thing as “splitting” your time between two groups.

I could keep going through my ~10 pages of notes on the show, but I think you get the idea.

The bottom line is that you will learn something, but it’s at the ~50% level on the “realism” scale.

Final Thoughts on Industry

Returning to the title of this article, I’m referencing The Guardian’s claim about this show: That it’s “easily one of the best shows of the decade.”

This claim depends on which decade you’re referring to.

If you go by the show’s 2020 premiere date, it’s a stretch to say that Industry ranks among the best shows of the 2011 – 2020 period.

But if you consider it a “show of the 2020s,” it may be one of the best shows of this decade by the time we reach 2030.

The landscape has changed, and we’re flooded with junk series on Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, and other streaming sites, while older franchises like Marvel and Star Wars have declined substantially.

Industry is a clear winner among the many bad-to-mediocre shows out there.

It gets the fundamentals right, creates interesting characters that become more engaging over time, and always made me want to keep watching.

In the current market, maybe that’s enough to be one of the best shows.

And if you’re looking for a bit more, you can always follow the series’ excellent investment advice as well: