You don’t have to be a fan of HBO’s Industry – though you should, as it’s easily one of the best shows of the decade – to know that there’s something going on between Eric Tao (Ken Leung), a cutthroat salesman at the fictional Pierpoint & Company investment bank in London, and Harper Stern (Myha’la), his equally shark-like protege.
Pick any scene featuring the pair from the first two seasons of the high-pressure financial drama, and you can detect something charged: shifty glances, dilated pupils, a cannily choreographed awareness of where the other is at all times. The background chatter of the show, now in its third season and finally picking up fans in HBO’s Sunday primetime slot, has been peppered with side comments about what’s going on with those two. “I need you to know,” says Harper defensively to a new manager early in the second season, “that he and I do not have the kind of relationship that people are saying we have.”
As with many statements on Industry, a show that expertly captures the innuendos, double-speak and power games of the financial class, there isn’t one clear meaning. The most obvious one is that people are saying they’re sleeping together, which they’re not. It’s not like that. It’s something else, visible in the way the characters are inexorably drawn to the others’ ruthlessness, how Eric knows it’s Harper on the other end of the phone from nothing but her silence: a platonic office romance, one of those ineffable bonds forged in a career that becomes identity. Industry, created by Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, is a true-blue workplace drama, in that all of the characters orbit the pleasurably cacophonous trading floor, and whatever they’re having outside of it – sex, drugs, alcohol, an emotional crisis – inextricably ties to work. And with the anchor of Eric and Harper’s inexorable professional and personal rivalry-cum-partnership, the most fascinating relationship on TV this year.
In a little over two seasons, Eric and Harper have gone through all the stages of a romantic relationship, without the will they/won’t they trap of sex: initial chemistry, soul-baring confessions, mutual secrets; blowout fight, make up, new heights and in the end of season two (spoiler alert), a betrayal that severs their working relationship – for now. Their brief reunion in Sunday’s episode – for Eric, tantamount to running into an ex with a new partner while you’re at your lowest – was so charged and tense I slid off my couch in stress. Harper’s command to look at me is as sharp a verbal dagger as this show of prolific backstabbers has ever produced. And particularly cutting one for these two, who have always seen each other more clearly than anyone else.
As with Mad Men’s Don and Peggy, or The Bear’s Syd and Carmy, Harper and Eric’s relationship – part mentor/mentee, part filial, part mutual self-interest – is the dramatic engine of the series, pushing each to new heights of ambition and deceit. They are a type of soulmate in the best and most toxic ways that can be interpreted – mutual understanding of each other’s best and worst potential, a tacit acceptance that they’re stronger together, at odds with their dogged selfishness. Both are drawn to Pierpoint for its cult of individualism; as Harper tells Eric in their first episode hiring interview, it’s as close to a true meritocracy as one can get. To Eric, an Asian American man, and Harper, a Black American woman, that’s an escape hatch – from poverty, from feeling dogged by racism, from doubt. Their chances of breaking into the top economic quintile from the bottom, as Eric tells Harper in one of his season one pep talks, is about 3%. “We intimidate people,” he says, “because hunger is not a birthright.”
Much of Industry’s run, which began when many Americans’ relationship to work and career fundamentally changed, focuses on the theme of mentorship: which values we pass on, how much you compromise for success, how relationships and decisions and examples build the (in this case, rotten but fascinating) culture of an institution. The ouroboros of greed and abuse. Kenny harasses Yasmin with no recourse, and she in turn discourages a newer grad of disclosing sexual assault, as a matter of practicality. The one time Eric’s manager complimented him, he tells Harper, the praise contained a racial slur. Various senior female managers invoke solidarity to steer Harper for their own interests; she chooses Eric, who sees her as a peer but also once locked her in a room in anger.
Such intense, contradictory, inarticulable bonds – intimate, like family, but not – are a common byproduct of jobs conflated with meaning, purpose, identity. Industry is perhaps the most successful recent show on so-called workism, the quasi-religious belief in one’s purpose through capitalist career, a throughline in what I’ve called “hustle culture” shows in recent years: Inventing Anna, WeCrashed, Super Pumped, The Dropout, all of which re-enacted headlining business stories of the 2010s with famous actors. Apple’s critical darling Severance imagined a literal work-life separation as dystopian hell, and HBO’s crown jewel, Succession, managed to depict many a boardroom while still feeling like a vulgar Shakespearean family drama. (Notably, all of these shows aired in 2022, as did Industry, the year that the pandemic’s reckoning with work made it to the silver screen.)
Industry depicts one end of the workism spectrum, of extreme emotional highs and lows (like most viewers, I have barely any sense of a “short sell” or IPOs, which doesn’t matter nearly as much as the characters’ intense feelings about them). But it’s a recognizable one – characters bonded by the work, navigating a minefield of personalities and agendas to stay in a morally compromised system for the purpose, status, and money it gives them. It’s not just Pierpoint, nor Mad Men’s Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, nor the toxic kitchen in The Bear.
Three episodes in, the show’s third season, like Succession before it, ponders that trap, characters stuck and cycling through interminable moral gray areas, a pattern contained by Eric and Harper’s relationship. You could read Eric’s decision to fire Harper in the second season finale as a selfish one, to dispose of his one true rival and a thorn in his side; as a fearful one, knowing that Harper will stop at nothing to win; as an act of compassion, saving Harper from herself and giving her an out for illegal insider trading. Most likely, all of the above. Regardless, of course she’d be back. She can’t resist.
In the first knockout moment of the stellar third season so far, she publicly humiliates Eric and corners him into accepting her new fund, co-run by Sarah Goldberg’s icy Petra, as a client. The mentee has become the boss, dictating the expectations – bespoke service, taking every call, eye contact. “Do you know who you’re dealing with here?” he asks Petra, who may or may not understand the depths of Harper’s desperation. Eric certainly does, and the cycle continues. What a thrill, to know no one understands them like they understand each other.
Industry airs on Sundays on HBO in the US with the third season arriving later this year on BBC One in the UK
