When HBO’s saucy high-finance series Industry began, it was primarily focused on young London-based analysts hoping to make their mark on the mega investment bank Pierpoint. How they functioned in the furnace, and blew off steam outside of it, made for soapy, satisfying young adult drama. These were kids thrown into a very different kind of post-adolescent crucible than the girls of Girls were subject to (though Girls creator Lena Dunham did some work on the first season); where Hannah and pals had ennui, the post-grads of Industry were focused, driven, ruthlessly ambitious.

But as the show progressed through its wobbly second season, the world of Industry began to expand. The young people remained at the center, but the series zoomed out to show more of the complicated mechanics surrounding them. Now, in its excitingly ornate rollercoaster of a third season (premiering on August 11), Industry is essentially just a companion piece to the late, great Succession. It’s another series about the top, top levels of the business world, albeit one that doesn’t take quite as much naughty, amused pleasure in showing the monstrousness of the one percent.

Where Succession had wry humor, Industry prefers grimness, sending its characters spinning into ever more precariousness. Show creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay are, I suppose, making a point about the financial world’s corrosive effect on the hearts and souls of those who keep it running. But in practice, all the strife seems to exist for its own sake. It’s a wallow, an artful bummer a bit high on its own supply.

In season three, Industry is also breathlessly entertaining. Yes, portions of these eight episodes are turgid and overwritten: angry monologues half sold by talented actors, whizzing technical talk delivered with smug snap, high drama that isn’t always credibly sourced. But Industry’s version of all that is vastly preferable to the kind seen on, say, The Bear. At least on Industry, things actually happen.

Season three opens in the nervous hours before a green-tech energy startup, Lumi, is about to go public. The company’s head, blue-blood poseur Henry (Kit Harington), is doing his best T-shirt and jeans founder drag—leaving the less palatable work to Pierpoint, which is overseeing the IPO. Sad-eyed, working-class hunk Robert (Harry Lawtey) has been embedded with Henry, and their class divide is beginning to chafe. Back at the office, Yasmin (Marisa Abela) is trying to stay involved in the fray while also spiraling about a scandal (or, really, multiple scandals) involving her zillionaire father, who has gone into hiding.

Yasmin’s struggles to balance work and an increasingly unmanageable personal life get perhaps the primary focus this season, complete with mystery box flashbacks. As her character grows ever more distressed and erratic, Abela manages to keep things mostly grounded. Her scenes with Harington are spiky and flirtatious and yet also bleak, while her always swooning chemistry with Lawtey takes on a bitter, poignant tinge. She’s the star of the season, bearing up nobly under a heap of outsized plot.

The series’s other breakout, Myha’la, is left to skulk around the periphery. Her character, American bulldozer Harper, has been cast out of Pierpoint, and is stuck working as an assistant at an “ethical” investment firm. She’s a killer in an uncomfortably moral-minded environment—one she has to destroy in order to escape. Harper finds an ally in the firm’s steely head of investments, Petra (Sarah Goldberg, of recent Barry fame), and the two get to scheming. The show has now pretty much confirmed Harper as a manipulative sociopath (an assessment made by many characters this season), which is interesting only to a point. Harper is an implacable monolith in season three, and her cruelty and conniving eventually grow repetitive.

So does all the office scramble and panic. Industry works hard to convince us that every trade, every reversal of fortune is of existential importance. It is fun to get swept up in that manic swirl, but over eight episodes, the crises blur together into one mass of outburst and alarm. One of the odd pleasures of the show is the inscrutability of its technical details—it is a comfort to simply trust that what they’re yelling about with such spittle, and assumed savvy, is of high significance. Still, the show would ideally find more varied levels, so that the really meaningful moments of wheeling and/or dealing stood out in starker contrast.

Industry’s emotional mapping is equally discombobulating. Motivations are murky; extreme decisions are made with jarring haste. But maybe that is the sneakily winning trick of the show, plunging us into the erratic, coked-up minds of its shaky heroes rather than ploddingly explaining every beat. We probably don’t need the literal drug trips, though. Season three guides us into psychedelic cliché in one episode, while another tries to ape Uncut Gems for a grueling standalone hour delineating a side character’s descent into hell.

What ultimately results from that episode is shocking and horrible, and threatens to topple season four (if there is to be one) into full melodrama. Which would be a shame, because the third season is pitched just about right: brash and irksome, sexy and intriguing. Industry’s picture of pretty people forever teetering between glory and ruin rarely lets us see them enjoying their ill-gotten wealth. But the show nonetheless manages to intoxicate us, to quiet our high-minded principles just long enough that, quite guiltily, we begin to envy them anyway.