How Greed Got Good Again

In HBO's Industry, Gen Z reveals itself to be just as moneyobsessed as the corporate raiders of Wall Street.

- Spencer Kornhaber

The question before the room was how much blood the banker should bleed. Mickey Down and Konrad Kay sat in an editing bay in Cardiff, Wales, scrutinizing footage from the third season of Industry, their HBO drama about the drug-addled, oversexed employees of a multinational financial firm. They'd paused on one particular shot of a character realizing that his nose had sprung a leak after much snorting of powders. The blood had been added digitally, and it fired down straight and steady from the character's nostril, like a burgundy laser beam.

The 35-year-old Down, wearing a Nike zip-up vest and thick tortoiseshell glasses, stroked his chin. The blood was looking a little too gruesome. "We just want it to be noticeable; it's a geyser at the moment," he said. A producer noted his feedback, and another unpaused the footage. The next shot revealed that the banker had been cradling a newborn baby in his arms and that the blood had splattered onto the infant's cheek.

The image, and the writers' matter-of-factness in discussing it, caused me to gasp. Down gave an apologetic chuckle. "We're sort of numb to it, aren't we?" he said. The 36-year-old Kay-the quieter and wryer of the two men-murmured, "It doesn't register." It referred to the depravity of Industry, a study of lethal greed and ambition transmitted from one generation to the next. When the series debuted in 2020, it followed a class of new hires at the London offices of Pierpoint, a fictional competitor to the likes of J. P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs. Young and diverse in race, sexuality, and class, the protagonists entered a century-old institution at which "culture change"-an attempt to build a kinder, more ethical workplacewas supposedly afoot. Rather than upending the system, however, the new hires proved quick studies at old-fashioned self-dealing and backstabbing.