"Industry" on HBO: Thoughts?
So HBO is putting out a new show this Fall called "Industry", following recent college grads in London as they enter the world of Finance. You can read a description and see some pics here, here, and here. According to the last link, it's about "ambitious twenty-somethings struggling to secure their futures in the cutthroat world of international finance. The characters compete for a limited set of permanent positions at a top investment bank in London — but the boundaries between colleague, friend, lover, and enemy soon blur as they immerse themselves in a company culture defined as much by sex, drugs, and ego as it is by deals and dividends."
What are everyone's thoughts? Personally I'm glad to see a show about the field focusing on recent grads rather than just the SVP's and MD's. Do we expect this to end up with a new flood of undergrads trying to get into the field? Is it gonna glorify or damage the image of people in the industry? Throw out some opinions, folks!
I hope HBO can salvage it but I’m sure it’ll be over the top and inaccurate with plenty of black suits and brown shoes in the mix. And I’m sure there will be a sea of retards itching to get into S&T (lol) in the same way people get pumped when watching Billions. If you are a simpleton who gets motivation from watching a cable Tv show, may god help you
It's gonna be a british "Girls" in suits....which I am pumped for because that show is my guilty pleasure (if you just accept they are all trainwrecks and don't try to empathize, the show is 10x better).
I bet it opens as follows: over shots of oxbridge or the City in London, a main character will monologue first about wall street/finance, then about how coveted IB is, the pay, and how they only pick some tiny % of people, overlayed on quick, wrap around cuts of the main characters and some others confidently answering technical interview questions, one person will screw up. It will feel very much like an Aaron Sorkin movie.
Then it'll flash to the main character's working class upbringing. Then it will kick off to their first day at Goldman Stanley where they walk onto a crazy trading floor. It'll be shot single-camera style (think Friday Night Lights movie/the office). You will see people yelling into phones and bloomberg terminals. Someone yelling will bump into someone with papers and not stop to help.
there'll be an IPO scene, someone will get asked for insider info
there'll be a yelling-but-damaged boss, some one will sleep with their boss-potentially a pressured situation, someone will start doing drugs to cope, someone will have to deal with a poor/alcoholic father/mother, someone will have a gf/bf who "doesn't get it" ....the standard 20-something drama tropes.
Fucking pumped lol
They are going to have the 22 year olds overseeing their own books one day, running pitches/ IPOs the next, doing quant shit the day after that, having the weight of the entire bank riding on their shoulders, etc
Wish they could show montages of dorks gossiping over Bloomberg and sleep deprived children spending 20 minutes googling for solutions to their 3am #VALUE! or the perfect non-pixelated company logo. This is just going to make the unsolicited cringey LinkedIn invites pour in
i guess we got the screenwriter here
I honestly would bet money that they browsed this forum at least a few times before writing the scripts.
is this what Andrew Klein’s Sorkin notes said?
Lol
wtf this is 99% accurate
Look up the German series "Bad Banks" - it is very literally exactly that. The main character is 23 and is all at once a structurer, a trader, a saleswoman and now (in the 2nd) season an ESG investor. Of course, there´s a crazy hotheaded boss (no points for guessing who the MC sleeps with), they throw bullshit jargon around like there´s no tomorrow and they do a lot of coke and so on. And the MC gets an roof-top apartment from her work, which is in one of the most expensive towers in Frankfurt. Had to stop the show every five minutes due to all that cringe.
I hope this show becomes a hit so people don't think I want to become a bank teller in my town.
a year later did people stop thinking you are a bank teller?
lmaoo damn you revived this thread for this eh did you set a calendar reminder too??
Meh, honestly it’s never really accurate and if it was accurate it would be boring. Just another thing to make sure that bankers are bad people and what they do is crazy hard which for both things is not the case.
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I'm excited for the episode where they'll show the analyst doing nothing all day, spending half an hour deciding what to order on seamless (and trying to fit the extra salad for tomorrow's lunch within the $30 budget), and then ultimately receive 9pm comments so that he ends up staying past 3am aligning logos - gonna be a thriller!
Cringe level = max.
I like the industry for its understated nature. Why do they have to ruin it.
Why does Lena Dunham have anything to do with a finance show? wtf
The writers are said to have worked in “international finance” (whatever that means) themselves yet you can’t find any information on their past stints. Both came out of Oxford though so at least they are less likely to be complete phonies
And since when are there females in S&T?
Logo Arranging:t TV Show
>Lena Dunham
And for that reason, I´m out
Not to revive an old thread, but just happened to see the first episode of this [spoiler alert if anyone actually cares]
To say it was pretty awful would be an understatement. Not even joking - they actually do have long extended scenes of bankers working late at night on some presentation/excel model. Which is incredibly boring to watch - seems like they were striving for a compromise between realism and interesting drama, and failed at both. Even the mediocre film that was Wall Street 2 was mildly entertaining (if completely unrealistic). And while Billions is also wildly unrealistic it is also quite entertaining at times.
Summary of the key plot points (I'm not making any of this up) -
1. One analyst dies after one all-nighter. Not only that, but he gets carried out in a body bag across the trading floor during the middle of the day, and nobody except the junior analysts notice or care. A couple of more senior guys are fooling around and making jokes as the body bag gets carried out. Obviously trying to rip the tragic story from the headlines from a few years back, but this is a complete fail.
2. The main character (female junior analyst) gets told at the end of her first couple of days "you are a world-destroyer, I see that in you" by a senior MD. Then she randomly decides to reward herself by checking into a top 5-star hotel in London (wtf) and the episode ends with her staring out over London. Hotels like that in London cost £500-600 a night easy, you're not doing that on an analyst salary.
3. Generic cliches like an MD walking across the trading floor with a baseball bat, colleagues laughing at an analyst's cheap suit etc.
Reading the critics' articles, it gets surprisingly positive reviews (80% on Rotten Tomatoes). But seems to be mostly from the liberal media who love it because it shows "the soul-destroying reality of banking." So yeah, if you've read this far into the post just save 45 mins of your life and skip this lol.
She checked in to the expensive hotel because she didn’t want to go back to her apartment, where Hari (the analyst who died) lived. Seems like you weren’t really paying attention during the episode tbh.
She checked in to the expensive hotel because she didn’t want to go back to her apartment, where Hari (the analyst who died) lived. Seems like you weren’t really paying attention during the episode tbh.
.
Yeah that’s true fair point, I could have been clearer in my synopsis. I just meant why a plush 5-star hotel - I guess it would have detracted from the glossy production if she had checked into a cheap travel lodge (and to its credit the whole production is very slickly done eg the music and ambience - you can tell it is an HBO production).
Also admittedly I was only half-watching it towards the end (just because it didn’t really hold my interest). Personally I was just disappointed as this could have been non-realistic but still enjoyable to watch (aka Billions) but alas it lacks both the realism and enjoyability factor.
Also I actually thought Hari was by far the best character imho - the actor nailed the role as a very smart but very insecure British working-class kid (I'm in the US but one of my parents is from the UK). The other characters seemed fairly generic/cliched. Maybe it's unfair to judge after just one episode. HBO productions are usually top-rate so I maybe just had my expectations too high.
Agreed, I liked Hari’s character a lot and also the dynamic between him and Gus.
Ok but how fucking hot is Marisa/Yasmin?? I would simp so hard for that ass
You're an analyst, she would simp for you
she sits on my face every night in my dreams
They put this out ages ago on BBC iPlayer, they just bought it. You can go watch it for free on there
Do people actually do coke like as frequently as they do in the show? I'm fine with drinking but i just wanna know if beyond the stereotypes, coke is actually a big thing in IB. I'm recruiting next year and wouldn't want to be in an environment where people are doing drugs on the job.
Banking, in reality, is a conservative, heavily regulated environment. No one does coke. Excessive drinking is not something I have seen either. There might be one or two big events a year where there's a lot of booze. But it's not like how it's portrayed in the show.
I'm fully with you, I wouldn't want to work in such an environment either (culture of excess etc). Thankfully, it is not like that.
My experience has been the total opposite of this. Binge drinking is encouraged and almost demanded at times. Lots of people do drugs and just keep it hushed.
I really think it depends on the team.
The show is also focused on the S&T desk, who can actually leave for drinks during the week.
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