Industry

Mickey Down and Konrad Kay's Industry launched on BBC Two and HBO in November 2020 and has run for three seasons through 2024, with multiple BAFTA nominations and Royal Television Society Award nominations. The pilot was directed by Lena Dunham. The series consolidated Down and Kay (both of whom had worked at major investment banks before turning to screenwriting) as one of the most carefully researched showrunner partnerships in 2020s prestige television.

A class of fresh graduates competes for a permanent spot at the cut-throat London investment bank Pierpoint & Co., where the trading-floor culture is fuelled by impossibly long hours, casual cruelty between senior and junior staff, drug use, and the unspoken pressures of class, race and gender that the industry's ostensible meritocracy claims to have transcended. Myha'la plays Harper Stern, an American graduate; Marisa Abela plays Yasmin Kara-Hanani, the privileged English daughter of a publishing dynasty; Harry Lawtey plays Robert Spearing, the working-class Oxford graduate; Ken Leung anchors the senior-management cast as Eric Tao.

The series's commitment to procedural-realist accuracy (actual trading-floor terminology, accurate compensation politics, the mechanics of equity sales-and-trading desks during the post-2008 era) produced a register that few previous prestige-television finance dramas had achieved. The series's third season expanded its scope to include the political-financial landscape of post-pandemic British capital markets.