Industry

Industry is the most bracingly alive drama on television — a series set inside the brutal meritocracy of a London investment bank that follows a cohort of ambitious young graduates competing for permanent positions in a world that rewards performance, ruthlessness, and the willingness to sacrifice everything. Created by Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, the show follows characters including Harper Stern (Myha'la), an American recruit hiding a secret from her resume; Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela), a well-connected Oxford graduate navigating her own privilege; and Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey), an emotionally volatile trader from a working-class background.

What elevates Industry above other workplace dramas is its unsparing honesty about power — who holds it, how it is extracted, and what it costs to climb toward it. The show is deeply uncomfortable in the best way: it refuses to make any character purely sympathetic or purely villainous, tracing instead the ways that an institution shapes and deforms the people inside it. The bank becomes a pressure cooker for class, race, gender, and ambition, with the trading floor as the arena where all these forces collide.

By its third season, Industry had evolved from a promising debut into one of the sharpest dramas of its era — tight, stylish, and willing to make choices that major network television would never attempt. It is essential viewing for anyone interested in the contemporary intersection of capitalism and identity.