Wall Street doesn’t want to talk about Industry.

The HBO series, currently airing its third season, dramatizes the machinations of power-hungry London investment bankers. Its traders are relentless in their desires: Harder drugs, kinkier sex, bigger bonuses. Industry has taken some of the biggest financial scandals, from the pandemic profiteers to the tragic death of a junior associate, and turned them into fodder for HBO’s prime Sunday night time slot.

Thus, financial insiders remain quiet on the show’s accuracy, speaking anonymously on platforms like Reddit and Wall Street Oasis about the show’s portrayal. Professionals from adjoining industries, however—from start-up staffers to lawyers—are happy to speak out about the show’s portrayal. And they find it painfully accurate.

“I think people are coming around to it in the financial world,” says Mickey Down, co-creator of Industry. “My friends who work in finance really like it. Even if it’s not your exact experience, you like to see something that you experience on TV, especially when I think we get it right.”

How Industry gets it right

Both Down and his collaborator Konrad Kay were bankers before they were TV writers. This gave them the inside look into the finance world they say the show would be incomplete without.

“Like any business, there’s a vernacular that builds up around [finance.] There’s a slang, there’s an aggression, there’s a shorthand,” Kay says. “There’s that rhythm, which I think you could only write if you’ve lived it.”

While Kay and Down funnel their finance backgrounds into the plotlines, they also work with extensive consultants to appraise the dialogue: “Trading is a very particular thing, in terms of who’s on what side of the trade, spreads, all that stuff that we never experienced. So, we needed to sense-check with somebody else,” Kay says.

Philip Alberstat, now a director at advisory firm Embarc Advisors, was a finance lawyer in London early in his career, working with the likes of Goldman Sachs, S.G. Warburg, and Chemical Bank. It brought him up close and personal with the city’s investment banking scene. The show’s early focus on sell-side traders, from Harper and Eric’s conniving calls to Rob’s ploy for just one client, felt familiar to him.

“I remember working with some investment bankers where they’d be slamming Red Bulls or coffees,” Alberstat says. “That’s depicted really accurately in the show. These are grueling hours. People are working late in the night and weekends. You basically get paid a ton of money, but you don’t have much of a lifestyle.”

In terms of that language and jargon Down and Kay worked so hard on, Alberstat finds it to be almost entirely accurate. The show’s abridged plotlines likely dumb down some of the financial terminology, he explains, but their usage is spot on.

“They’re using the terms in an accurate way, but not in a fully detailed [way],” Alberstat says. “Taking a short position is really well thought out, whereas in the show, it’s touched on quickly. You’ve got to keep the narrative going.”

The tech behind Industry also adds to its realism. Pierpoint & Co., Industry’s fictional investment bank, has an expansive trading floor crowded with monitors and blinking lights. Traders are constantly donning their headsets, speed dialing through callpads, and communicating through instant messaging. Yasmin, one of the show’s central up-and-comers, has her cocaine habit exposed through a Pierpoint instant message review.

For Down, the show’s partnership with Bloomberg to include its terminals in on set was a coup: “To the trained eye, as soon as you go into a trading floor or a bank, [if] you don’t see those multicolored Bloomberg keyboards or the Bloomberg monitors, you immediately think you’re watching something inauthentic,” Down says.

Kay notes that all of the technology on set is fully functional, including the “hoot,” a permanently open microphone for trading announcements. “It helped the actors that they could actually hear a voice on the hoot, where you can have a more authentic relationship with that audio,” he says. “The closer we could make it feel to reality, the reality would come through the screen.”

While Alberstat notes that Pierpoint’s technology is accurate, he points out how some financial institutions have moved away from high-tech floors.

“Trading floors are just a bunch of people sitting at computer desks now,” Alberstat says. “Half the time, you can’t really tell who’s trading and who’s just looking at Google.”

IPOs, ESG, and season three trendlines

Industry is constantly aiming to tap into the financial zeitgeist. Initially that was a deeper look at the state of graduate overwork, before a season two exploration of healthcare financing. For season three, Down and Kay take on a hot-button area of finance: Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) funds.

Pierpoint struggles to guide Lumi, a green energy company, towards an IPO. There are several missteps along the way: Lumi’s misrepresented debts, their brazen founder (played by Game of Thrones’ Kit Harington), and Pierpoint’s general inadequacy. Brian Samson, a startup mainstay and founder of Plugg Technologies, found the pre-IPO hubbub familiar.

“There’s the founder who has his own financial motivations. His lock-up period was much shorter and it created some raised eyebrows, which it certainly should,” Samson says. “We certainly see that in the startup world. Investors want to invest in founders that are there for the long run.”

In the show, Lumi’s founder, Sir Henry Muck, is also a financial nepo baby. His godfather is a wealthy financier, and his uncle is the publisher of Industry’s Daily Mail. The show is about power imbalances and privilege, a topic Samson says was big in his work.

“I think about being in San Francisco, and you have a lot of people from Stanford and Berkeley and MIT,” Samson says. “But there’s also people there that went to state schools and have a little chip on their shoulder, like Harper or Eric. They have that underdog mentality.”

Industry’s third season has quite a cynical take on ESG. Lumi doesn’t fare well, while Harper, who was fired from Pierpoint and took up work at an ESG firm, eventually defects to start her own fund based solely on anti-ESG sentiments; it’s wildly successful.

Kim Steele, an environmental film producer and consultant at green energy company Budderfly, had given up on Industry after the first season. Still, hearing the third season would have an ESG-tilt, she decided to take it back up. The results were refreshing.

“I absolutely love the fact that they portrayed this green energy tech guy as a complete, horrible douchebag,” Steele says. “Sustainability has an altruism problem. Everyone is expected to want to save the planet out of the goodness of our hearts, and that’s simply not a good enough motivator. [ … ] For those of us who aren’t pessimistic, [Industry] forces us to confront some of the very real challenges to what we’re trying to do.”

Steele believes that Industry’s ESG-bashing could lead, in fact, to more thoughtful ESG investing. “It opens up the conversation of, ‘Do you have to be a good person to want to invest in clean energy and climate tech?’” she says. “In my opinion, the answer is no, everybody should be doing it, no matter what type of person you are.”

Since ESG’s formation, there have been detractors and public naysayers. Still, amid a spike in anti-DEI activism, ESG has taken a recent public beating, making the third season highly topical. It’s part drama, part news; Industry is covering financial dilemmas as they happen.

“In an environment where making money is the be all and end all, is it possible to make money in a way that benefits humanity and society?” Down says. “We always want to reflect an ongoing debate.”