HBO's Industry is like Working Girl for a new generation

https://time.com/5908293/industry-hbo-review/

"The finance guy has been a stock character ever since Gordon Gekko slithered onto the screen in 1987, with his slicked-back hair and suspenders, preaching the gospel of greed," says Judy Berman of the Lena Dunham-produced HBO finance drama from creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay. "If Wall Street created the crude, cocky, womanizing, cocaine-hoovering, white-guy archetype, then American Psycho took it nuclear with Patrick Bateman, a Reagan-era psycho killer who sauntered off the pages of Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 novel into Mary Harron’s scathing satirical film from 2000. The Great Recession touched off another wave of finance bros: The Big Short, Margin Call, The Wolf of Wall Street, Wall Street sequel Money Never Sleeps and, on TV, Billions. We’ve seen a handful of nominally diversified variations on the theme, from Mike Nichols’ post-feminist touchstone Working Girl to Black Monday, a Showtime comedy about Black, queer and female outliers at an upstart firm in the mid-’80s. Yet neither the interchangeable Type-A personalities nor the noisy, overstimulated, testosterone-poisoned genre has evolved much over the course of two generations during which public opinion toward finance has shifted. Which is why it’s surprising to see HBO’s Industry—a smart and contemporary, if almost comically libidinous, take on London high finance—attract so little advance attention. Premiering Nov. 9, the ensemble drama follows a cohort of post-collegiate recruits at the fictional firm Pierpoint & Co. This so-called 'graduate' program pits the entry-level workers against one another for permanent job offers, in a competition made extra awkward and stressful by the fact that they’re also the center of each other’s social lives. Amid an atmosphere thick with performative confidence, where a tiny mistake could end a career before it’s properly begun, new hires must not only prove their mettle, but also calculate how their race, class, gender and sexuality might influence their prospects in a field that isn’t exactly known for its tolerance."