So I finally started watching this after it was mentioned a few times here, and overall it's rather shit. Bear in mind I've only seen season 1, so if there's a drastic change in season 2 onwards, I'll happily revise my comment, but yeah it's quite shit. And it's not shit because it's poorly made or acted - it's got all the HBO bells and whistles you'd expect, is polished on the outside and plods along quite well.
It just has nothing to say. Nothing whatsoever. You can't reasonably make a show about the disgusting milieu that is the financial world and not have a modicum of self awareness - its need to sylishly gloss over the excesses of the shallowness of these vacuous people by inserting cut away scenes of breasts, penises and coke is teenager level production and ultimately doesn't address the elephant in the room. These people are nothing, offer nothing and serve no purpose. Make that show! Don't make something that you're pretending is casting a critical eye on the industry but is low-level glorifying it and trying to give it a cool spin.
It also has this peculiar issue of having a generally good to strong cast, with some compelling figures (I've found myself surprised to emphasize more than I would have imagined with trust-fund-princess Yas) spread throughout the show, but decided to make its central figure the most unlikeable, unrelatable, erraticallly written and ultimately entirely uninteresting character in Harper, which is made even more unpalateable due to an incredibly weak, look-at-me-channeling-my-inner-Zendaya performances I've seen in a big production. She's terrible.
It's ultimately quite watchable as some trashy pulp (probably pleonastic?) guilty pleasure, with a vomit bucket close by for when they go hard on the crypto-bro, finance is so cool we're the masters of the universe schtick (with none of the charm, wit or humour a sense of self awareness would give it), but if you pitched a show about "graduates integrating the finance world and will give an insider's view on this cut-throat and relentless industry" (I'm assuming the pitch meeting would have been something to that effect), and were worried about how shallow it might be... well it's exceeded expectations and gone all-in.
I will caveat all the above by admitting it's trying to say a few interesting things about women in the industry, and is surprisingly doing so in a not too heavy-handed way, which gives me hope that there is some talent in the writing staff somewhere, once they get rid of the Ayn Rand, Warren Buffett idolisers who have gotten the tone entirely wrong.
