What the HBO series does better than anything else on TV right now.

The biggest financial stories of the 2020s revolved around silliness. The bizarre nature of modern markets has come in many forms, but you never needed a finance degree to understand that these stories were a little silly. An eccentric cryptocurrency CEO dragged markets down for months when he took money from depositors at his cryptocurrency exchange, gave it to his hedge fund, and invested it in made-up coins whose value was tied to confidence in his own business. A Reddit and YouTube user proved he could change the value of a public company by billions of dollars by posting a wordless meme. Retail investors more or less directly gave millions of dollars to people Bed Bath & Beyond owed money to, proping up the company’s stock price as it went bankrupt. The money is real, but all the actions are ridiculous, and the people doing them are either amateurs or fraudulent, wonderful CEOs with funny haircuts.

One of the advantages IndustryHBO’s drama, which is nearing the end of its third season, is that the show knows that uncouth outsiders don’t have a monopoly on destructive financial decision-making. The meme stock story of 2021 wasn’t just the result of aggressive, hopeful young men with Robinhood accounts, but also of seasoned hedge fund executives misreading the market. Multiple investment banks lost billions of dollars that same year because they allowed a notorious financial fraudster to lend them money and make shady stock bets. One of those banks, Credit Suisse, later required a buyout, ending its nearly 170-year history as a standalone company, to avoid bankruptcy.

There is one episode left Industry The series focused on professionals in suits who made bad financial decisions. Industry is more about people in the markets than the markets themselves, but a fictional investment bank called Pierpoint is the backdrop for the series. One of Industry so far, is that it skillfully uses real financial trickery to tell stories about its characters. The financial storyline that underpins Season 3 is pretty dumb, but no dumber than anything the real world has produced in the past few years. What would make good fodder for a congressional subcommittee wanting to yell at executives also, as it turns out, makes great television.

The financial season is all about the buzz around environmental, social, and governance investing, also known as ESG investing. The approach gained popularity in the 2000s and 2010s, as financial institutions sought to tell an idealistic story about their investments. It wasn’t just impersonal asset managers or big banks that made money by picking good stocks, they were also picking good companies that were somehow making the world a little better and improving their own prospects. There were a number of ways a company could improve its ESG score—perhaps by working on renewable energy, having a woman on the board, or even just by getting really good at recycling in the office. In the early 2020s, ESG had two camps of rabid critics: capitalists who thought it wasn’t lucrative, and conservatives who thought it wasn’t conservative. Ron DeSantis has called ESG “a global effort to inject woke political ideology into the financial sector, putting politics above the fiduciary duty to make the best financial decisions for beneficiaries.” The Republican Party, among ideological allies elsewhere, hates it.

Pierpoint, a fictional bank that is the center Industryborrowed a ton of money to invest in ESG-focused companies that turned out to be huge flops. By the end of the season, those loans are coming due, and Pierpoint has no money. Analyst Harper Stern (Myha’la), who went to the hedge fund after Pierpoint fired her for some light insider trading last season, overhears a warning about the bank’s vulnerability from a bathroom stall. (“Edge,” she calls it.) Harper’s hedge fund attacks Pierpoint’s stock with a massive short sale, leaving the 150-year-old investment bank on the brink of collapse heading into the finale.

Harper is both an antiheroine and the show’s most relatable character, demonstrating the benefits of ideological flexibility when it comes to money. A few episodes earlier, after starting the season at an ESG-focused firm, Harper sees a fallback when the firm’s portfolio manager (Sarah Goldberg) leaves to pursue a distinctly anti– An ESG firm that will focus on old market fundamentals. Harper’s friend and sometimes-foe Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) remains at Pierpoint, serving as a reminder that financial institutions are only as strong as their weakest link. (It’s Yasmin who falls for it and shows Harper a list of Pierpoint’s underperforming ESG investments.)

Whole Industry team pokes and prods at the various types of people who populate the cutthroat world of finance. Market creator Rishi Ramdani (Sagar Radia) has a nice sports car and a beautiful wife and kid, but he also has six-figure gambling debts, a bookmaker who just broke his off-screen arm, and an insatiable appetite for cocaine and women who aren’t his wives. Eric Tao (Ken Leung) is a newly minted Pierpoint partner who fancies himself a good friend and institutionalist but is happy to throw both dear pal and tradition to the wind when he has a chance to advance. Newcomer Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington) is the founder and CEO of the aptly named “Lumi,” a green-energy startup that implodes shortly after its initial public offering. His social circle includes a tabloid owner and a moderate Conservative politician who uses the government’s news of Lumi’s death to set up her eventual run for prime minister. Somewhere in the middle of it all, Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey) is the only genuinely good person on the show — which, in this world, means he’s often taken advantage of by his employer, his clients, and the woman he loves most, Yasmin Abeli. Robert follows Muck around, and at one point gets into a vicious wrestling match with Harington’s character over his ridiculous behavior. (Robert is the show’s version of the poor Tesla employee who probably needs to ask Elon Musk to stop tweeting things that will get the company in trouble.)

Industry The focus isn’t on financial machinations. It’s on relationships, especially the one between Harper and Yasmin, two young women with opposing socioeconomic backgrounds and market sense. (Yasmin is a publishing heiress with little talent; Harper is a self-taught writer who can’t stop getting into trouble.) The financial industry is a vehicle for examining these relationships. It’s not Industry point.

But it’s also something this show does better than anything else, and better than anything else on TV right now. Industry is a finance show that relies on true stories and doesn’t rely on exposition or oversimplification to explain them. That makes some episodes a little thick, but it also makes the show a fun puzzle for the humanities-minded and (one assumes) a neat window into it for those working in finance. Industry remains one of the few shows to write COVID into its storyline not out of obligation but because it was fruitful territory for the subject. Season 2 was structured around pandemic stock trading, which proved a good way to explore the isolation of remote work, the way professionals talk to each other about rebellious amateurs (“Reddit virgins,” as they’re called on the show), and the compromises that both idealists and craven careerists are willing to make at a critical juncture. (Financial crime turns out to be one of them.)

In this ecosystem, Industry wants to be a show about the human condition and how we respond to incentives. But in the process, the show makes two important points about money today. First, it’s easy to create a lot of value quickly on a Bloomberg terminal, but it’s even easier to destroy it. Just take Pierpoint, the bank: One partner ruefully notes that “it took 150 years to build it and a two-minute phone call to tear it down.” Second, the people who get the big salaries and bonuses to mess with the market aren’t always the most savvy financial operators. (The most effective financial mind this season may actually be a predatory bookmaker who repeatedly puts one character’s life in danger.) Industry whether the program is willing to ask the question: if wealthy bank executives can lose billions in the blink of an eye, why can’t they You?