Industry

An HBO/BBC co-production from Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, both ex-bankers writing what they know. It follows a cohort of young graduates fighting for permanent seats at Pierpoint & Co, a fictional London investment bank that treats its junior staff like disposable batteries. The ensemble centers on Myha'la as Harper Stern, a scrappy American operator with a résumé that won't survive scrutiny; Marisa Abela as Yasmin Kara-Hanani, a posh publishing heiress slumming it on the FX desk; and Ken Leung as Eric Tao, the senior salesman who runs the floor like a small dictatorship. Season one drops you into the grad program, hazing and all, and lets the desk politics do the plotting.

The dialogue is the pitch. Down and Kay write finance-speak the way Sorkin writes lawyer-speak, except crueler and horned up. Nobody stops to explain what a Repo is, and the show is better for it. Ken Leung's Eric is one of the great TV bosses, a man whose approval is currency and whose disappointment is a weapon. Myha'la plays Harper with a coiled-spring stillness that makes every meeting feel like a hostage negotiation. Season two is where it locks in: a new hedge-fund villain played by Jay Duplass, Ken Leung getting a real interior life, and directors like Birgitte Stærmose staging trading floors like combat scenes. The needle drops are excellent. The suits are cut correctly.

Season one is a lot of drugs, bathrooms, and bad decisions before the writing catches up to its own ambition. If you can't tell a swap from a swaption and don't want to guess, the first four episodes will feel like eavesdropping on strangers arguing about their jobs. The show loves an emotional pile-on. Every character is being destroyed by their parents, their boss, their lover, and their P&L simultaneously, and once in a while you want someone to just eat a sandwich. Season three is the wobbliest, pivoting toward a green-energy IPO plot that some viewers will find sharpened and others will find soapy.

If you liked Succession for the meetings more than the yacht scenes, you're the target. Fans of Margin Call, The Bear's kitchen anxiety, or early Mad Men will click in fast. People who need a hero to root for will bounce by episode two, because everyone here is compromised and half of them are actively awful. If jargon annoys you rather than seduces you, skip it. If watching rich twentysomethings ruin their lives at 3 a.m. sounds tedious rather than delicious, this isn't your show.

WORTH IT, not GOAT, because the show swings for prestige and mostly connects. The craft is the case: Leung and Myha'la are giving performances that would headline a lesser show, the writing trusts you to keep up, and the direction treats a Bloomberg terminal like a loaded gun. It has real things to say about class, ambition, and the machine that eats young people for margin, and it says them through character rather than through speeches. Nobody monologues the thesis. The desk does. When season three stumbles, it stumbles because the writers were reaching, not preaching, and season four's reinvention shows they're still willing to break their own toy. That's why it clears the bar.