Industry (2020–2024): A Brief Review

Industry, also known as “Sex Lives of Finance Wannabes,” is a kind of low rent Succession on HBO (there’s even a joke about Kendall Roy in the second season). It is about the lives of people who work at an investment bank in London in 2020–except there is no Covid until the second season, but no matter. I guess the first season all takes place in January 2020.

Even more than Succession, this show convinces you that one should never work in “Sales,” no matter how much money they might pay you. Because your “friend” might stab you in the back, even right after he f — s you or snorts coke with you. Either/or.

This show probably has more graphic sex than any other show that I’ve seen, which includes Oz, Tell Me Lies, Girls, Skins, and Game of Thrones, but it definitely varies it a bit more than those and the psychologies of the characters and how they’re handled are more believable. What isn’t so believable is how much cocaine these people snort. And no one overdoses the entire time (well, not from coke, anyway).

The show also takes on labor exploitation, sexual harassment, bureaucracy and confusion inherent in that, and the way rivals, who are ostensibly friends/coworkers, manipulate the system to push others out of the way — only to have it backfire on them, in many cases.