15 TV Shows To Watch If You Like HBO’s Industry

“Industry” has turned out to be one of the most pleasant surprises of the 2020s in television — a mean, nasty, pull-no-punches immersion into the icy wilderness of the British stock market, conducted through first-rate storytelling in which every character, every scene, and every decision matters. The show’s account of the personal and professional exploits of a vast ensemble of up-and-comers and seasoned players in the financial sector is as harrowing to watch as it is absolutely addictive, and the recently-concluded Season 4 has proven that “Industry” is capable of dramatically reinventing itself without losing any of its bite.

There’s still a fifth and final season on the way, but, if you’re an “Industry” fan looking for something to tide you over now that the newest batch of episodes has reached its conclusion, there are also several other worthwhile shows that you can count on to scratch a similar itch. Below, you’ll find a list of 15 TV series that will make high-reward additions to your portfolio if you love “Industry.”

One of the best HBO original series of all time, the multi-Emmy-winning “Succession” splits the difference between snappy, topical, razor-sharp comedy of errors, and grand operatic tragedy. Following the fracas for power and fatherly approval going on between the wealthy children of global media mogul Logan Roy (Brian Cox), the show layers Shakespearean depth into what might superficially scan as a dry shaky-cam workplace farce, to utterly wondrous, medium-reshaping results.

“Industry,” as it happens, is among the shows that hail most clearly from a post-“Succession” world. The power games among Pierpoint upstarts could be rather reasonably described as a kind of younger British counterpart to the dog-eat-dog world of dynastic mega-wealth depicted on “Succession,” and both shows are among TV’s most unflinchingly brutal and gripping depictions ever of high-powered corporate life. While the Roys’ four-season-long cold war of ambition, dysfunction, and resentment is must-see viewing for anyone who appreciates great longform drama, it’s of particular interest to fans of the slick office machinations, precision-strike dialogue, jittery hierarchical disputes, and caustic social commentary of “Industry.”

Originally released on the now-defunct Sony streaming platform Crackle, “StartUp” fuses the subgenres of the financial thriller and the crime caper into a singular, pulse-pounding drama. Set primarily in Miami, the show follows a triad of characters brought into unlikely collaboration: Nick (Adam Brody) is a banker who finds himself at wit’s end after being roped into illicit dealings; Izzy (Otmara Marrero) is a Cuban-American hacker whose cryptocurrency idea may change the future of money itself; and Ronald (Edi Gathegi) is a Haitian-American gang leader who wants to clean up his act for the sake of his family.

From this tripartite dramatic core (with Martin Freeman also in tow as a crooked FBI agent), the show spins out a unique, enormously watchable yarn, in which the movement of massive amounts of money becomes a literalized, tangible enterprise with life-or-death stakes. This ingenious idea imbues the financial lingo and hermetic office dramatics of “StartUp” with an unusually high level of urgency for the genre, making the show an even grittier and more white-knuckle counterpart to the taut pecuniary storytelling of “Industry.” And, at three seasons and 30 total episodes, there’s plenty to dig into.

The German-Luxembourgish TV series “Bad Banks” stars Paula Beer (better-known in the U.S. for her film roles in François Ozon’s “Frantz” and Christian Petzold’s “Undine”) as Jana Liekam, an investment banker who gets fired from a prestigious Luxembourg financial firm and begins to work at a major Frankfurt bank, where she finds herself at the epicenter of various illegal practices. Determined to overcome the finance world’s chauvinistic culture, Jana must decide to what extent she’s willing to compromise herself ethically to get ahead in her career.

Like “Industry,” “Bad Banks” brilliantly uses the framing of a restless financial drama to get across a story about the toll of stepping out into the world as an ambitious twentysomething, the dubious nature of self-actualization, and the allure of welcoming moral murkiness in the name of success. And the show’s sociological angle gives it extra resonance, with the rampant machismo and fraught gender dynamics of Jana’s milieu adding tension and complication to her story while also keeping the heightened one-percenter intrigue in conversation with pressing real-world questions and issues.

Executive produced by Michael Mann (who also directs the first episode) and adapted from the eponymous memoir by American journalist Jake Adelstein, the HBO Max original series “Tokyo Vice” tells the fictionalized story of Adelstein’s plunge into the criminal underworld of Tokyo. The show begins in 1999, as Jake (Ansel Elgort), newly-arrived to Japan, is commencing work at the Meicho Shimbun newspaper; intrigued by the tension between the city’s façade of safety and the darkness lurking underneath, he begins to investigate Yakuza activities, and comes into conflict with powerful, dangerous figures.

Although the fact that it’s set halfway across the world several decades earlier might suggest that it doesn’t have a lot in common with “Industry,” “Tokyo Vice” is an easily recommendable follow-up watch. In addition to existing within a very similar tonal and aesthetic ballpark to its bank-centric HBO-BBC cousin, with similar attention to the throbbing urban rhythms that belie the dark heart of a ritzy global metropolis, “Tokyo Vice” also shares “Industry’s'” love of dense, fine-grained ensemble plotting centered around bitter disputes and power plays, in which the flaws and demons of every character make up pieces in a sprawling board.

Arguably the most high-profile finance-centric TV show of the past decade, Showtime’s “Billions” chronicles the vicious conflict between U.S. Attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) and billionaire hedge fund manager Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis), whose beloved philanthropist persona conceals shady business tactics. As the two men circle each other in a tense battle of wits, the show gradually expands to cover various corners of the New York City high finance world and the extremely high-stakes negotiations, schemes, and scuffles therein.

Needless to say, it’s a must-watch for “Industry” fans. While “Billions” is a lot more taken with the mechanics of the finance world per se, with even more arid terminology and even greater emphasis on the positionality of institutions, it is, at heart, just as much of a lurid primetime soap as “Industry.” And, for all the dizzying technical specificity of its plotting, it also finds plenty of room to explore the characters’ emotionally and sexually charged personal lives, and the way that their personal hungers, hang-ups, and histories inform their ongoing battles and interlocking stories.

Based on the “Slough House” spy novel series by Mick Herron, Apple TV’s darkly comical “Slow Horses” has found significant Emmy success, winning Outstanding Drama Writing honors for its first season and Outstanding Drama Directing for its second. This widely acclaimed show follows a group of MI5 agents who work in a de-facto banishment room, enduring menial and bureaucratic work as punishment for having made serious but non-firable mistakes. Under the supervision of the gruff and snarky Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman, who considers the show a career highlight), once-promising agent River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) and others get thrust into unexpectedly important and risky missions, which they must navigate with their department’s limited resources.

It’s another example of a show that should be catnip for fans of “Industry” even if its central thematic focus is markedly different. Just as “Industry” is concerned with the raw, twitching matter making up the hearts and souls of people in an ultra-glossy business, “Slow Horses” also makes the most of a high-low balance, pursuing increasingly heightened and sophisticated espionage plots while keeping everything rooted in the fundamental tawdriness of the Slough House. And, befitting their Britishness, both shows also wear cheeky cynicism and mordant verbal wit on their sleeves.

One of the most gleefully profanity-laden shows of the 2010s, “House of Lies” adapts the eponymous 2005 book by Martin Kihn into a propulsive antihero dramedy. Don Cheadle gives one of his most elastic and riotously entertaining performances in the role of Machiavellian management consultant Marty Kaan, who leads a team of similarly unscrupulous associates (played by Kristen Bell, Ben Schwartz, and Josh Lawson with equal cackling gusto) in manipulating CEOs, rescuing amoral businesses, and closing self-serving deals at any and all costs.

With the protagonists’ weekly cases ranging from clothing labels to pharmaceutical companies to megachurches to sex toy manufacturers, “House of Lies” has endless possibilities at its disposal to explore capitalist amorality from varied, rotating perspectives. Add to that the absolute wickedness of its team of protagonists, and you’ve got yourself an even more twisted and outrageous take than “Industry” on the concept of economics-as-melodrama. And, although “House of Lies” is more outwardly comedic and at times outright goofy, when it does get serious, it cuts just as deep.

After being passed on by HBO, AMC’s “Mad Men” helped lead the charge in establishing the TV golden age of the late 2000s and 2010s. Its story of the crisscrossing character journeys at a major New York City advertising agency in the 1960s permanently transformed TV workplace fiction, incorporating literary density and texture, aesthetic flair reminiscent of the Modernist masterpieces of midcentury European cinema, and stunning levels of political clarity, with each episode offering trenchant sociocultural insights by the minute.

Every office-set show made ever since owes something to “Mad Men.” But “Industry,” in particular, follows splendidly in its example of character depth and moral-slash-emotional conflict as the foundations of heightened career-centered drama. If you enjoy watching the Pierpoint employees jump at each other’s throats in ever messier, more tragic, and more character-revealing ways, you owe it to yourself to give a shot to the show that set the contemporary blueprint for this particular mode of storytelling. “Mad Men” may be slower and opt for a more wistful and contemplative tone on the whole, but it’s such a work of genius that it feels as thrilling as an action series.

Originally released as a miniseries before getting brought back for a second season in 2026 (with Season 3 already ordered at Amazon), “The Night Manager” is everything you could want out of a John le Carré adaptation: Sleek, suspenseful, perfectly-paced, and splashily glamorous in the refined way that the best spy thriller shows and movies often are. Tom Hiddleston plays Jonathan Pine, a former British Army soldier now working a night manager in high-end hotels; his life gets drastically turned around when he’s hired by International Enforcement Agency head Angela Burr (Olivia Colman) to infiltrate the operations of dangerous arms dealer Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie).

Much like “Slow Horses,” “The Night Manager” makes a case for espionage and international intrigue as realms not too far removed from high-end finance, at least as far as swanky-yet-somber TV mood-setting is concerned. It’s a brilliantly-written show in which the weight of excellent characterizations bears down heavily on the pressure points of a carefully-assembled plot, with stakes that are plenty high in and of themselves even before they’ve roped the viewer into emotional fixation — so, a pretty kindred experience to “Industry.”

“The Fear Index” is a 2022 miniseries that leverages the nail-biting 24-hour mayhem of the eponymous 2011 Robert Harris novel into an intricate, carefully-structured freakout. Told in just four lightning-paced parts, the story follows hedge fund founder and tech whiz Alexander Hoffman (Josh Hartnett), an American immigrant to Switzerland, who must deal with mounting pressures when the launch of a revolutionary new predicting algorithm at his firm coincides with escalating threats from a mysterious home invader.

If you’re an “Industry” fan looking for a financial thriller on the same level of black-hearted intensity, you’ve come to the right place. In fact, the plot of “The Fear Index” is even more direct, pressing, and apocalyptic — an extended downward spiral with little to no room for either Hoffman or the viewer to catch their breath. Few works in the genre make the nexus between huge numbers and huge anguish so blunt and intuitively-felt — to say nothing of how deftly the show incorporates contemporary economic and technological anxieties, in a way that calls to mind “Industry” in its more prescient stretches.

Created by chameleonic TV auteur Elizabeth Meriwether (also known as the mastermind behind “New Girl” and “Dying for Sex”), “The Dropout” tells the notorious story of Elizabeth Holmes, the once-hyped biotech entrepreneur who fell into disgrace after it was discovered that her purportedly revolutionary blood-testing company Theranos was built on a foundation of fraud. Amanda Seyfried, in an utterly transformative turn that netted her a Primetime Emmy for Miniseries Lead Actress, plays Holmes alongside Naveen Andrews as her business partner and lover Sunny Balwani.

Although ostensibly a fly-on-the-wall true-crime series (in which the specifics of the crime in question are refreshingly free of sensationalized carnage), “The Dropout” is, much like “Industry,” primarily interested in the grand, loopy dramatics of ruthless white-collar enterprising. Anchored by Seyfried’s note-perfect work, the show endeavors to be an incisive character study of Holmes over the course of her meteoric rise and fall, as well as a darkly comedic portrait of the madness of for-profit healthcare and 21st-century venture capital. Like “Industry,” it also couches its electrified plotting in sharply-written, wonderfully-acted ensemble dynamics that make each boardroom standoff feel startlingly alive.

The highly successful French comedy-drama series “Call My Agent!” takes place in a very different milieu from “Industry,” but the mood is similarly cutthroat: With rotating major stars of French cinema on board as fictionalized versions of themselves, the show follows four Paris talent agents who live in a state of perpetual fever-pitch stress — dealing, any given moment, with the complications of multiple film and TV productions, the toll that the business takes on their personal lives and relationships, and the brittle egos of their actor clients.

Swap a few industry-specific terms, tone down the over-the-top comedy by about 20%, and take out the “The Studio”-esque entertainment industry meta-ribbing, and “Call My Agent!” could almost be an “Industry” spin-off, or vice-versa. Both shows are keyed in on how it feels to be a determined young professional in a billionaire industry that tends to chew people up and spit them out unceremoniously, and both make the most — narratively as well as experientially — of their bustling cosmopolitan environments and rarefied rich-people-only chambers.

The Italian series “Devils” is a financial drama that takes on the urgency of a global political thriller. Adapted from the 2014 novel “I diavoli” by Guido Maria Brera, the show is set in the years following the 2008 financial crisis, as its effects spread out in waves across Europe’s economy. Massimo Ruggero (Alessandro Borghi) is a trader at a major investment bank who, under the wing of American CEO Dominic Morgan (Patrick Dempsey), is heavily favored to become the firm’s new vice-CEO — until he gets dragged into a conspiracy that turns out to be connected to numerous major world events.

With the battle of wits between Massimo and Dominic as a starting point, the show makes a bombastic, morbid spectacle out of the sheer moral wreckage laid bare by the global recession of the late 2000s and early 2010s, leveraging the stories of its scheming plutocrats into gnarly drama while also critiquing the rapacity and destructiveness of the system they’re propping up. It’s not quite as excellent as “Industry,” but it’s a solid, effortlessly watchable slice of television within a similar register.

Massively successful in its first year before somewhat receding away from mainstream attention and awards consideration, yet never less than diligently fantastic, USA Network’s “Mr. Robot” is one of the defining shows of the 2010s — and a notable stylistic precursor to the diagrammatic office suspense of “Industry.” 

An Emmy-winning Rami Malek stars as Elliot Alderson, a kindhearted but deeply troubled cybersecurity engineer who leads a double life as a hacker vigilante. Driven to do something about the calamitous state of the world, he joins a revolutionary hacktivist group that intends to take apart the global financial system.

It’s the other side of the coin to the insider’s perspective of “Industry” — and, if the HBO and BBC series zeroes in on characters who have resigned themselves to, or are actively galvanized by, a fundamentally bleak system, “Mr. Robot” sizes up the enormous difficulty and personal cost of actually standing up to that system. Its protagonists are brave and principled, yet broken and imperfect; they’re more sympathetic by design than the cunning antiheroes of “Industry,” but both shows are not so much straightforward epic sagas as winding, labyrinthine, unbearably suspenseful stories about what it’s like to exist as a human under the shadow of capitalism’s hulking machinery.

For a series that deals with the topic of competition in the corporate world in its own uniquely gripping way, you can look to one of the best AMC TV shows: “Halt and Catch Fire,” which revisits the early days of personal computing and gaming across four very different but similarly phenomenal seasons. 

Through the stories of charismatic businessman Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace), brilliant but frustrated computer engineer Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy), Gordon’s savvy homemaker-turned-entrepreneur wife Donna (Kerry Bishé), and programming wunderkind Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis), “Halt and Catch Fire” shrewdly charts the anxiety and exhilaration behind the scenes of the ’80s tech revolution.

It’s a warmer and more melancholy show than “Industry” on the whole, occupying a sort of halfway point between its queasy raw-nerve intensity and the smoky, languid gloominess of “Mad Men” — but not one iota less incisive or enthralling than either show. There have been very, very few shows in the 21st century that hold a candle to “Halt and Catch Fire” when it comes to telling tightly-woven, carefully developed stories about the meaning of ambition, success, and personal accomplishment; “Industry” is among those shows, and fans of one should find a lot to love in the other.