How Greed Got Good Again

The question before the room was how much blood the banker should bleed. Mickey Down and Konrad Kay sat in an editing bay in Cardiff, Wales, scrutinizing footage from the third season of Industry, their HBO drama about the drug-addled, oversexed employees of a multinational financial firm. They’d paused on one particular shot of a character realizing that his nose had sprung a leak after much snorting of powders. The blood had been added digitally, and it fired down straight and steady from the character’s nostril, like a burgundy laser beam.

The 35-year-old Down, wearing a Nike zip-up vest and thick tortoiseshell glasses, stroked his chin. The blood was looking a little too gruesome. “We just want it to be noticeable; it’s a geyser at the moment,” he said. A producer noted his feedback, and another unpaused the footage. The next shot revealed that the banker had been cradling a newborn baby in his arms—and that the blood had splattered onto the infant’s cheek.

The image, and the writers’ matter-of-factness in discussing it, caused me to gasp. Down gave an apologetic chuckle. “We’re sort of numb to it, aren’t we?” he said. The 36-year-old Kay—the quieter and wryer of the two men—murmured, “It doesn’t register.”

It referred to the depravity of Industry, a study of lethal greed and ambition transmitted from one generation to the next. When the series debuted in 2020, it followed a class of new hires at the London offices of Pierpoint, a fictional competitor to the likes of J. P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs. Young and diverse in race, sexuality, and class, the protagonists entered a century-old institution at which “culture change”—an attempt to build a kinder, more ethical workplace—was supposedly afoot. Rather than upending the system, however, the new hires proved quick studies at old-fashioned self-dealing and backstabbing.

Industry has been praised for turning the jargon and technical intricacies of high finance into gripping entertainment. The show is also unmistakably a product of its time: Its pacing is as frenetic as a TikTok binge, and its plotlines touch on Brexit, meme stocks, and—in the upcoming season—green investing. Because of the show’s sharp-witted, slickly produced treatment of money, privilege, and existential emptiness, some critics have anointed it the heir to HBO’s Succession. But where Succession is fundamentally a family saga about the jaded rich, Industry focuses on fresh converts to the savagery and excesses of the business world. In that, it feels spiritually more akin to grandiose send-ups of 1980s corporate boom times: Wall Street, American Psycho, Glengarry Glen Ross. And like those predecessors, Industry can’t help but glamorize the very milieu it’s trying to skewer.

Today’s young adults—so often stereotyped as quiet-quitters and socialist revolutionaries, driven by idealism and fixated on self-care—may seem a far cry from the suspenders-wearing yuppies of the Reagan era. Industry, though, argues that the Wall Street mantra “Greed is good” is very much alive and well. In Down’s view, the typical Gen Zer is “a mini Margaret Thatcher.” He added, “I don’t even think they consider it, like, ‘capitalism.’ It’s just ‘securing the bag.’ ”

The inspiration for Industry came more than a decade ago, when a 21-year-old Merrill Lynch intern who’d reportedly worked for 72 hours without rest died of an epileptic seizure. (“It is possible that fatigue brought about his fatal seizure, but it is also possible that it is something that just happens,” the coroner said.) The then-BBC executive Jane Tranter read a news article about the incident and was horrified. This was a few years after Bear Stearns collapsed, and the ensuing crisis had thrown a harsh light on the win-at-all-costs ethos of high finance. Tranter told me that she had wondered, after the disaster of the 2008 financial crash, “why the fuck would anyone choose to go and intern in one of those banks?”

Then she found two aspiring TV writers who’d done just that. Down and Kay had met as undergrads at Oxford, where they bonded over similarities in their backgrounds. Both men were raised poshly, but their immigrant mothers—Kay’s from Poland and Down’s from Ghana—preached the importance of proving one’s worth with a paycheck. As Down put it, “The immigrant mentality is almost sort of a euphemism for capitalist.” When recruiters from the big banks came to campus, the two friends applied for jobs because it felt like what was expected of them. Down remembers thinking, “What the fuck else am I gonna do?”

Down landed in mergers and acquisitions at Rothschild & Co., Kay in equity sales at Morgan Stanley. They turned out to have little aptitude for the work—both of them left within three years, with dreams of making it in the entertainment world—but they did feel, for a while, seduced by the identity their roles provided. “I was really proud of my Morgan Stanley bag,” Kay remembered. “I’d take it into a bar. I’d be like, ‘Look at me; I’m such a big, swinging dick.’ ”

Big, swinging dick had been a prized title for high earners on Wall Street at least since its appearance in the 1989 book Liar’s Poker, in which the journalist Michael Lewis described the fraternity-like antics he’d witnessed at Salomon Brothers. When Kay and Down joined the workforce in the early 2010s, they quickly found that, despite the recent financial collapse, the BSD ethos was still going strong. “You came into contact with people who had been there literally since 1982,” Down said. “They were stuck in their ways. They were not going to change at all.” And just as the old modes of doing business remained intact, plenty of retrograde views did too. “The moment a woman turned her back, everything was about sex: what she looked like, what she was wearing, who’s fucked her, would you fuck her—all that sort of stuff,” Kay said. “And weirdly, a lot of the misogyny was from very senior women.”

When Down and Kay set about making a series inspired by their time in finance, they quickly realized that they wanted to dramatize the experience of fresh-faced newcomers adapting to an institution that refuses to evolve. The denizens of Pierpoint know that times are supposed to be changing: In one scene, the foulmouthed trader Rishi announces, in a tone of mock triumph, “Bullying has been eradicated from the culture!” Nevertheless, during the first season, the recent college grad Yasmin is targeted by her boss in a sexist tirade at a work dinner. That boss ends up taking a leave of absence and apologizing. Yet as Yasmin rises in the ranks, she pays forward her abuse to colleagues in subtle, but still horrifying, ways.

That Yasmin doesn’t look like her tormentor is the point. Previous portrayals of high finance emphasized it as a patrilineage: In Wall Street, the rookie trader Bud Fox idolizes the diabolical Gordon Gekko as the sort of man he can aspire to become. But Industry revels in the complexities of mentor and mentee relationships in a workplace shaped by overlapping social and demographic waves. In the first season, Harper Stern—a Black American trainee at the bank—finds her allegiances torn between two bosses: Daria Greenock, a white Millennial fluent in the rhetoric of corporate feminism, and Eric Tao, an Asian American Gen Xer feared for his ruthlessness. Both try to woo Harper with identity-based overtures. “People like us, born at the bottom … we intimidate people here,” Eric says, positing himself and Harper as fellow outsiders.

Ultimately, though, Harper doesn’t seem to feel sentimental affinity toward any of her elders. All she shares with them is a thirst for winning—and so she strategizes based on who has more clout in the corporate hierarchy. Myha’la Herrold, the actor who plays Harper, told me how she thinks about her character’s dynamic with Eric: “He’s like, Oh, I’m seeing myself in you. And she’s like, I would like to see myself where you’re sitting.”

Some viewers may be tempted to wonder whether Down and Kay have gone overboard on the cynicism. But just this year, a 35-year-old Bank of America associate who’d reportedly complained about 100-hour workweeks died of a sudden heart problem—recalling the sort of tragedy that inspired Industry years ago, and that was dramatized in the show’s premiere. (No definitive link between the employee’s workload and death was determined.) Surveys of generational attitudes about money and work suggest that growing up amid the chaos of inflation, crypto, and a pandemic—not to mention the constant, conspicuous salesmanship of online influencers—has encouraged, not challenged, aspirations toward wealth among young people. A recent New York Times article reported that college students are angling for so-called sellout jobs with a zeal that surprises longtime faculty. At Harvard, the share of grads going into finance and consulting is reaching heights not seen since before the 2008 financial crisis.

And despite Industry’s disturbing take on the high-finance lifestyle, many in its audience have been the opposite of repelled. The creators told me that they regularly hear from new bankers who say that the show inspired their choice of career. One friend of Down’s reported that multiple people in his M.B.A. program had enrolled because they were hard-core fans of Industry. Recently, in a West London pub, two young guys approached Kay to express their admiration for the series. They seemed like exaggerated versions of the showrunners’ earlier selves—“two actual drunken, coked-up—for want of a better word—morons,” Kay said.

François Truffaut once said that no movie about war could ever truly be anti-war; history has shown the finance world to be virtually shame-proof. Young bankers have treated Liar’s Poker, an exposé, as “an instruction manual,” Lewis has said. Gordon Gekko lives on as a dorm-poster symbol of alpha-maledom. Even the sadistic, chain-saw-wielding Patrick Bateman of American Psycho has, in recent years, been memed as a mascot for the “rise and grind” ethos that some young men fetishize: wake up, work out, make money, repeat. (So what if a few body parts are stashed in the fridge?)

Down and Kay understand why finance types love their show. For all its darkness, Industry is a pageant of beautiful and superhumanly competent people entangled in slinky romances and high-stakes dealmaking. Entertainment about hyper-capitalism “has to have both the seductive element to it and the warning,” Down told me, and the seductive elements include fine cars, expensive clothes, and the freedom to do and say whatever you want so long as you’re closing deals. In Wall Street movies, “the first act is usually ‘Look how amazing this all is,’ ” Down said, and “every finance bro seems to just forget about the third act.”

But the show’s deeper appeal lies less in its depiction of the spoils of success than in its dramatization of the actual work. Industry’s seductions and warnings seesaw relentlessly; each trading-floor triumph or delirious night at the club tends to crash into a comeuppance and a monstrous hangover. Even the older, more experienced characters are perpetually grinding—not because they have to, but because they want to. As one billionaire hedge-fund manager explains in the show, “It’s all just a cycle of victory and defeat.” The people of Pierpoint are addicted to the cycle itself.

Season 3, which premieres August 11, intensifies that chase to sometimes-nauseating extremes. “Every time we come back to Industry, it’s the same, but bigger and more … gross,” Herrold told me. The show is more lurid in its tone, more shocking in its twists, and it delivers, as Kay put it, even more “weird sexual stuff ” than before. “We just want to throw everything at the wall,” Down added. “The sweet spot for this show is when people”—audience and characters alike—“are about to have a heart attack.”

The escalating grossness is also making a broader point about the stakes of the game that Industry’s characters are playing. This season focuses on the rise of ESG investments—short for “environmental, social, and governance.” Looking to tout itself as the greenest mega-firm in the business, Pierpoint funds a sustainable-energy company headed by Henry Muck, a handsomely vapid child of privilege played by Game of Thrones’ Kit Harington. In the real world, ESG has been evangelized as a market-driven solution to the climate crisis, appealing to the idealism of younger investors and consumers. It has also been exposed, in various instances, as a front for fraud, speculation, and the rebranding of the planet’s worst polluters.

Unsurprisingly, Industry’s angle on all of this proves, in Kay’s words, to be “the most cynical view you could possibly have.” The show makes quite clear that its characters and the institutions they work for are glorified gamblers—and that they’ve rigged the global casino so that their debts get paid by other people. Meanwhile, the lifestyles of the rich and amoral glitter more than ever; the new episodes’ settings include a yacht, a private jet, and a sprawling old-money estate. Although Industry’s characters have never been virtuous, the “stripping away of humanity,” Kay said, is all but total this season.

Part of that is simply a function of time passing on the show: The longer these characters remain enmeshed in their work, the more corrupted they become. Eric—separated from his wife and in the throes of a midlife crisis—wins a promotion and gets caught up in toxic C-suite machinations. He realizes that there is always another moral line he’ll have to cross to succeed at his job. “We really did experiment with, like, ‘What happens if this guy really sells his soul for money?’ ” Kay said. “ ‘What happens if he really keeps making decisions which get rid of his personhood and make him an embodiment of the institution?’ And it takes him to a pretty fucking dark place.”

At its core, the show remains a portrait of intergenerational continuity, of avarice bridging gaps of age and sensibility. In Cardiff, I watched Kay and Down edit a scene in which a veteran money manager lectures Harper about the usefulness of insider trading (he’s nearly quoting Gordon Gekko’s dictate to only “bet on sure things”). The elder character, wearing a necktie while fly-fishing, refers to the younger one, who is clad in a leather trench coat and has a nose ring, as “terribly modern.” The line lands as a joke: Though they hail from different historical eras, these two characters are, in some ways, interchangeable. If Industry has a “thesis,” Kay said, it’s that, although social mores change, one generation of “animals with an economic incentive” is exactly the same as the next.

This article appears in the September 2024 print edition with the headline “How Greed Got Good Again.”