Industry is an exhilarating dive into the world of international finance, as seen through the eyes of ambitious twenty-somethings struggling to secure their futures. 

The eight-part BBC-HBO series follows a group of young graduates competing for a limited set of permanent positions at a top investment bank in London – but the boundaries between colleague, friend, lover, and enemy quickly blur as they immerse themselves in a corporate culture defined as much by sex, drugs, and ego as it is by deals and dividends. 

Penned with candid insider intel by former bankers Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, Industry takes us inside the world of high finance through the eyes of an outsider, Harper Stern (Myha’la Herrold), a talented and ambitious rookie from upstate New York. 

The series is produced by Bad Wolf (The Night Of, His Dark Materials), with the tone for the show set by Golden Globe winner Lena Dunham (Girls), who directed the pilot. 

Down and Kay’s fresh take was to approach the world of high finance as a character drama. “We were obsessed with the idea of the trading floor as an anthropological place to study human beings,” Kay says. “You’re forced to sit next to each other for 12 hours a day, it’s super high intensity, you’re promised this meritocracy but it’s incredibly hierarchical… we thought if we could capture that authentically, it would be a hotbed for drama.” 

Down and Kay created an ensemble cast of disparate outsiders who, because of the competitive process that will see only some of them get permanent jobs, are both friends and adversaries for every waking hour. And they don’t have to be likeable or scrupulous to be hugely compelling. 

Industry‘s diverse ensemble cast includes Herrold, Harry Lawtey (Marcella), Nabhaan Rizwan (1917, the upcoming Station Eleven), Marisa Abela (Cobra), and David Jonsson (Deep State) as the graduates, with Freya Mavor (The ABC Murders, Skins), Will Tudor (Game of Thrones), Conor MacNeill (Death and Nightingales, Artemis Fowl) and Ken Leung (High Maintenance, Marvel’s Inhumans) as management. 

Industry is already earning five star reviews in places like The Guardian and The Independent, who hail it as, “A millennial Mad Men with plenty of swagger… The kind of thrillingly fresh series that only comes along once every few years, a drama that makes its rivals look tired and uninspired….”

The first four episodes of industry are now streaming first on Showmax, with new episodes coming every Wednesday. Binge the full season from 30 December 2020.