What the HBO show does better than anything else on television right now.

The biggest stories in financial markets of the 2020s were about silliness. The bizarre nature of modern markets has taken different forms, but you never needed a finance degree to understand that these stories were somewhat frivolous. A strange crypto CEO depressed markets for months when he took money from depositors on his crypto exchange, gave it to his hedge fund, and invested it in made-up coins whose value was tied to trust in his own company. A Reddit and YouTube poster has proven he can increase the value of a publicly traded company by billions of dollars by posting a meme without words. Private investors more or less directly donated millions of dollars to the people to whom Bed Bath & Beyond owed money, propping up the company's stock price as it slid into bankruptcy. The money is real, but the acts are all ridiculous, and the people who commit them are either amateurs or fraudulent CEOs with funny haircuts and boy wonders.

One of the virtues of industryAs the HBO drama nears the end of its third season, the show knows that uneducated outsiders don't have a monopoly on destructive financial decisions. The meme stock story of 2021 was not only the result of aggressive, starry-eyed young men with Robinhood accounts, but also the result of a market misunderstood by veteran hedge fund bosses. Several investment banks lost billions of dollars that same year because they allowed a well-known financial fraudster to borrow their money and use it to make opaque stock bets. One of these banks, Credit Suisse, then demanded a takeover, ending its nearly 170-year history as an independent company in order to avoid bankruptcy.

There's still one episode left industry This season, the series focuses on professionals in suits who make poor financial decisions. industry is more about the people in the markets than the markets themselves, but a fictional old investment bank called Pierpoint forms the background of the show. One of industry The main story so far is that it artfully uses real-world financial hacking to tell stories about its characters. The financial plot underlying the third season is pretty stupid, but by no means stupider than what the real world has produced in recent years. What would be good fodder for a congressional subcommittee looking to yell at executives is, it turns out, also good television.

The financial phase of the season is a real buzz about environmental, social and governance investing, also known as ESG investing. The approach gained traction in the 2000s and 2010s as financial institutions sought to tell an idealistic story about their investments. A faceless asset manager or a major bank would make money not just by picking good stocks, but also by picking good companies that somehow make the world a little better and thereby improve their own prospects. A company could improve its ESG score in a variety of ways – perhaps by working on renewable energy, adding a woman to its board, or simply becoming really good at recycling in the office. At the start of the 2020s, ESG had two camps of hopping critics: capitalists who didn't think it was lucrative and conservatives who didn't think it was. Ron DeSantis called ESG “a global effort to instill a woke political ideology in the financial sector and to put politics above the fiduciary duty of making the best financial decisions for beneficiaries.” The Republican Party, one of its ideological allies elsewhere, hates it.

Pierpoint, the fictional bank in the center of industryborrowed tons of money to invest in ESG-focused companies that turned out to be big stinkers. Late in the season, those loans are about to come due and Pierpoint doesn't have the money. Analyst Harper Stern (Myha'la), who ended up at a hedge fund after Pierpoint fired her last season for petty insider trading, hears a warning about the bank's vulnerability from a bathroom stall. (“Edge,” she calls it.) Harper's hedge fund puts Pierpoint's stock under pressure with a massive short sale, leaving the 150-year-old investment bank on the brink of collapse before the finale.

Harper is both an antihero and the closest thing the series has to a protagonist. It demonstrates the benefits of ideological flexibility when it comes to money. A few episodes earlier, after starting the season at an ESG-focused company, Harper sees an emergency exit when a portfolio manager at the company (Sarah Goldberg) leaves the company to explicitly start a company Anti-ESG company that will focus on old-school market fundamentals. Harper's friend and sometimes nemesis Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) remains at Pierpoint and serves as a reminder that financial institutions are just as strong as their weakest link. (It's Yasmin who gets tricked into showing Harper a list of Pierpoint's lost investments in ESG companies.)

The whole industry The ensemble teases and provokes the different types of people who populate the cutthroat world of finance. Market maker Rishi Ramdani (Sagar Radia) has a cool sports car and a beautiful wife and child, but he also has six-figure gambling debts, a bookie who just broke his arm offscreen, and an insatiable appetite for cocaine and women, who are not. Not his wife. Eric Tao (Ken Leung) is a newly minted Pierpoint partner who sees himself as a good friend and institutionalist, but is happy to throw both a good buddy and tradition out the window if he has the chance to move up. Newcomer Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington) is the cocky founder and CEO of the well-known “Lumi,” a green energy startup that collapses shortly after its IPO. His social circle includes the owner of a tabloid newspaper and a moderately branded Tory politician who is using the government hearing about Lumi's death to prepare her eventual candidacy for prime minister. Somewhere in all of this, Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey) is the only truly good person on the show – which in this world means he's frequently taken advantage of by his employer, his customers, and the woman he loves most, Abelas Yasmin. Robert follows Muck and at one point gets into a heated fight with Harington's character over his ridiculous behavior. (Robert is the show's version of the poor Tesla employee who presumably has to ask Elon Musk to stop tweeting things that would get the company in trouble.)

industry The main focus is not on financial machinations. They are relationships, particularly those between Harper and Yasmin, two young women with contrasting socioeconomics and market savvy. (Yasmin is a publishing heiress with little talent; Harper is a self-made market maven who can't stop getting into trouble.) The financial industry is an ideal starting point for exploring these relationships. That's definitely not it industry Point.

But it's also what makes the show better than anything else, and better than anything else currently on television. industry is a financial show that draws on real-world stories and does not rely on exposition or oversimplifications to explain them. That makes some episodes a little thick, but it also makes the series a fun mystery for humanities majors and (one suspects) a nice window into people who work with money. industry remains one of the few series that incorporated COVID into its plot not out of obligation, but because it was fertile territory for the subject. Season 2 revolved around pandemic stock trading, which proved to be a good way to explore the isolation of remote work, how professionals talk to each other about rebellious amateurs (“Reddit virgins,” as they are called in the series), and the trade-offs that both idealists and cowardly careerists are prepared to do in critical times. (Financial crime is one of them.)

In this ecosystem industry wants to be a show about the human condition and how we respond to incentives. But in doing so, the series makes two important points about money today. First, it's easy to quickly create a lot of value on a Bloomberg terminal, but it's even easier to destroy it. Take Pierpoint, the bank: a partner wistfully points out that it “took 150 years to build it and a two-minute phone call to bring it all crashing down.” Second are the people who have big salaries and bonuses Getting to mess up the market doesn't always come from the smartest financial players. (The most efficient financial mind this season may actually be the predatory bookmaker who repeatedly threatens one of the characters' lives.) industry Is the show ready to ask the question: If well-heeled bank managers can lose billions in the blink of an eye, why not? You?