Watch ‘Industry’ this year-end for a gallery view of grubby trading
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Looking for an online serial to binge-watch in the run-up to 2025? Viewers with a literary bent need look no further than One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Netflix version of Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967 novel directed by Alex García López Laura Mora. Those with even a casual interest in finance, high or low, might be better rewarded by watching Industry.
An HBO serial directed by Lena Dunham (of Girls fame) that’s available in India via the Jio Cinema app, it’s about high-strung careers and low-laid lives at an investment bank called Pierpoint, and its third season tops BBC’s list of ‘The 20 best TV shows of 2024’ for good reason. It is fiction, of course, set in the City of London. So its sordid portrayals of what goes on in the global financial industry are exaggerations, though plausible enough not to be caricatures.
In a way, it does for today’s generation what Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street did for Gen-X: It gives us a gallery view of an operation theatre, Pierpoint’s trading floor in this case, letting us watch with morbid fascination the innards of how money is made off money. It’s a slow-burn story, if that’s possible in the zip-zap-zoom world of stocks, bonds, derivatives and strategies that seem borrowed from wrestling (‘straddle’). The first season may take some patience, but once the characters settle in, their motives go ulterior and diverse themes emerge, both social and financial, it gets riveting as it ascends to a third-season crescendo.
Viewers unfamiliar with the world of asset trading may be thrown by the narrative at first. Hang in there—for its scope is quite rewarding. It features a short-squeeze of a dud stock by rebel retail traders, likely inspired by
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