The creators of HBO's Industry have a problem: the people who should feel uncomfortable watching their show keep telling them how much they love it.

Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, the show's co-creators, revealed they receive "a slew of messages" from finance professionals who completely miss that the show is critiquing their world, not celebrating it. It's the Sopranos problem all over again: people idolizing characters who were written as warnings.

Industry doesn't glamorize finance culture - it dissects it. The show portrays a world of brilliant people using their intelligence to shuffle money around while producing nothing of actual value, burning themselves out for status and validation. The characters are compelling, yes, but they're also frequently miserable, morally compromised, and spiritually empty.

And yet the finance bros watch and think: "That's so me!"

This says something depressing about media literacy, but also something deeper about how certain industries have internalized their own toxicity. When your professional culture is built on aggression, manipulation, and zero-sum thinking, maybe seeing yourself portrayed that way doesn't register as criticism.

The same thing happened with The Wolf of Wall Street. Martin Scorsese made a movie about greed destroying lives, and Wall Street types threw viewing parties. David Chase spent eight years showing Tony Soprano as a violent, narcissistic criminal, and men started dressing like him.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: satire stops working when your audience has no shame. You can't critique behavior that people are actively proud of. You can't make someone feel bad about values they've already embraced.

Down and Kay are in the strange position of making brilliant, incisive television that the people it's about love for all the wrong reasons. That's not a failure of the show - it's a success. It means they're capturing something true.

But it's also kind of terrifying.