Industry’s creators, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, both former bankers, have spent much of the HBO show’s three seasons delineating the mercenary sensibility needed to succeed in high finance. Despite all the drama of the characters’ personal lives—they sleep with each other, do drugs together, manipulate and lie to one another—the show’s premise is quite simple. “The soapy operatics,” Vikram Murthi writes in his review, serve a straightforward “critique of capital”: that the world of high finance is a war of all against all. This critique at times can be cartoonish in its excesses: Everyone becomes a Machiavelli, as friends and lovers betray one another in desperate pursuit of profits and material advancement. And yet, Murthi notes, it reveals something more subtle as well: that even while everyone is making lots of money and doing a lot of partying, no one appears to be having much fun—not even the show’s viewers. “Industry’s hardly the first series to document the cutthroat excesses of the business world—forebears like Mad Men used similar ingredients potently. But there’s often a spark missing from the proceedings that keeps Industry from greatness. Maybe it’s because the dialogue isn’t funny enough, or because the general self-destruction doesn’t cut deeply enough to be fully tragic.” Even when it is entertaining, Industry ultimately tends to reveal how little exists beneath the surface: how the “moral race to the bottom” can also quickly become “monotonous.” Read ““Industry”’s Gleeful Critique of Capital”