Watch ‘Industry’ this year-end for a gallery view of grubby trading

An HBO serial directed by Lena Dunham (of Girls fame) that’s available in India via the Jio Cinema app, it’s about high-strung careers and low-laid lives at an investment bank called Pierpoint, and its third season tops BBC’s list of ‘The 20 best TV shows of 2024’ for good reason. It is fiction, of course, set in the City of London.

So its sordid portrayals of what goes on in the global financial industry are exaggerations, though plausible enough not to be caricatures. In a way, it does for today’s generation what Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street did for Gen-X: It gives us a gallery view of an operation theatre, Pierpoint’s trading floor in this case, letting us watch with morbid fascination the innards of how money is made off money.

It’s a slow-burn story, if that’s possible in the zip-zap-zoom world of stocks, bonds, derivatives and strategies that seem borrowed from wrestling (‘straddle’). The first season may take some patience, but once the characters settle in, their motives go ulterior and diverse themes emerge, both social and financial, it gets riveting as it ascends to a third-season crescendo.

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Viewers unfamiliar with the world of asset trading may be thrown by the narrative at first. Hang in there—for its scope is quite rewarding. It features a short-squeeze of a dud stock by rebel retail traders, likely inspired by America’s GameStop episode that battered hedge funds, and an inflated public offer that swiftly turns scandalous, with ESG investing treated as just another spinner of lucre.

Clean-tech bets get dumped—and such stocks shorted—at the first whiff of a shift in sentiment, with Dolly Parton blithely quoted as having said, “We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails." The story climaxes with the US-based Pierpoint going bust and its board making frantic calls to politicians in London and Washington for a state-led rescue. Private profits and socialized losses are just a sub-theme, though.

What takes breaths away is all the skulduggery on display within the bank. Backs are stabbed, cliques formed and loyalties switched with sufficient volatility to beat a yo-yoing asset. In a way, Industry is about the power of money to bury hatchets of betrayal and forge alliances of profit across bitter break-ups.

Despite moral qualms being crowded out by a higher purpose (that of striking a jackpot), a la algo-trading, the show’s triumph is the empathy it evokes for its protagonists, all of whom face off-work dilemmas. The most finely crafted grey character challenges normative notions of guilt over her role in the death of her wealthy but dissolute father.

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Critics who called Industry a carnival of “sex, drugs and buy-and-sell" may have either failed to follow it closely or quit too early. All said, it’s the ambiguities explored that make it a worthy watch. A big let-down, though, is its failure to craft a speech that could take on Wall Street’s ‘Greed is good.’

Not that it doesn’t try. “Orderly financial exchange is the basis of harmony," declares a heroic Pierpoint leader in a pep-talk under the shadow of a takeover. “Money tames the beast. Money is peace. Money… money is civilization. The end of the story is money." It echoes Fukuyama, but falls flat.

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