The setting is a gleaming glass tower in London’s central business district, but it would be hard to find a darker workplace than the hellhole that is Pierpoint & Co. The fictional investment bank is the bleak and confronting base for the drama Industry (Binge, Foxtel Now), which is currently into its third season.

An enterprise perpetually in the throes of frantic activity, it’s the caustic and possibly vengeful creation of writer-producers Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, both escapees from the rough-and-tumble of the finance industry. And the company is like an urban jungle, riddled with substance abuse and staffed by people cracking under the stress of trying to survive. Down and Kay portray a toxic culture in which the urgency is unrelenting: there’s always a deal to be made, an investor to attract or appease, an IPO to navigate. The clock’s always ticking and the fear of failure is ever-present.

At Pierpoint, people dress in smart suits or silk shirts and pencil skirts, and treat each other horribly. Everyone is struggling to hold on to their jobs and claw their way up the ladder in a place where nothing is secure and everyone is expendable. Bullying, bluffing, backstabbing and betrayal are routine. Relationships are transactional. The way in which characters talk to each other can cut like a knife and the language is profane.

The first season of the series, which is mostly shot in Wales, opens with the arrival of a clutch of keen recruits. Leading the pack is the often-inscrutable Harper Stern (Myha’la Herrold), a black American expat who lies about her qualifications in order to secure a position. Alongside her are Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela), a multilingual British-Lebanese heiress accustomed to a jetset lifestyle, and Robert Spearing (Harry Lawtey), whose Oxbridge graduate appearance conceals humbler origins. In the pilot episode, an indication of the nature of the organisation that they’re entering comes when another of the new hires commits suicide in the toilets.

Industry is not a series inclined to subtlety. Everything is writ large: the brutal environment, the billion-dollar stakes, the excesses of the characters’ lives. As the series follows the recruits’ ups and downs – literally and figuratively, as there’s a lot of coke-snorting, boozing and sex – their brave new world is revealed as one that operates with a lot of jargon. It has its own acronym-filled language, which can be baffling to the uninitiated. But understanding precisely what’s going on isn’t really necessary, and not understanding isn’t prohibitive because what the show banks on is confecting an addictive sense of urgency. Viewers just need to recognise that something important is at stake, the deadline is imminent, and the characters are battling to defuse the latest threat, whatever the hell it is.

While all of that’s in play, issues of race and class are woven through the drama. Denizens of the English upper class are awful, although the ambassadors of new money aren’t any better. Everywhere, though, people like Harper and Robert are outsiders.

At the outset, the series effectively introduces its key characters and establishes a framework and tone. But, despite the frenetic activity at the trading desks, in bedrooms, boardrooms, mansions, swish restaurants, pubs and clubs, little has changed since. Industry is oddly static.

Early in the third season, Harper, sporting a radical haircut to signal a new chapter, is employed by a different company and separated from her mentor, sometime accomplice and sometime tormenter, Eric Tao (Ken Leung). Her bosses at FutureDawn are women, but the company is as much a nest of vipers as Pierpoint.