YYou don’t have to be a fan of HBO’s Industry – although you should be, as it is undoubtedly one of the best shows of the decade – to know that something is going on between Eric Tao (Ken Leung), an unscrupulous salesman at the fictional London investment bank Pierpoint & Company, and Harper Stern (Myha’la), his equally shark-like protégé.

Pick any scene featuring the couple from the first two seasons of the financial drama, and you can detect something charged: sly glances, dilated pupils, a deftly choreographed awareness of where the other is at all times. The background chatter of the show, now in its third season and finally winning fans in HBO’s Sunday prime time slot, was peppered with side comments about what’s wrong with the two“You have to understand,” Harper defends himself to a new manager at the start of the second season, “that he and I do not have the kind of relationship that people say we have.”

Like many statements in “Industry,” a show that expertly captures the innuendo, double-dealing and power plays of the financial class, there is no clear meaning. The most obvious is that people say they sleep together but they don’t. It’s not like that. It’s something else, visible in the way the characters are inexorably drawn to each other’s ruthlessness, the way Eric knows only by her silence that Harper is on the other end of the line: a platonic office romance, one of those ineffable bonds forged in a career that becomes an identity. “Industry,” created by Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, is a true workplace drama, in which all the characters orbit the pleasantly cacophonous trading floor, and everything they have outside of it — sex, drugs, alcohol, an emotional crisis — is inextricably linked to work. And with Eric and Harper’s unstoppable professional and personal rivalry and partnership as the anchor point, the most fascinating relationship on television this year.

In just over two seasons, Eric and Harper have gone through all the stages of a romantic relationship without the “will they or won’t they” trap of sex: initial chemistry, soul-baring confessions, mutual secrets; heated arguments, reconciliation, new highs, and at the end of season two (spoiler alert!), a betrayal that destroys their working relationship — for now. Their brief reunion in Sunday’s episode — for Eric, tantamount to running into an ex at a low point with a new partner — was so charged and tense that I slid off the couch from stress. Harper’s command, look at me is the sharpest verbal dagger this show full of notorious traitors has ever thrown at them. And it’s especially sharp for these two, who have always seen each other more clearly than anyone else.

Like Don and Peggy in Mad Men or Syd and Carmy in The Bear, the relationship between Harper and Eric—part mentor/mentee, part filiation, part mutual self-interest—is the dramatic engine of the series, driving both to new heights of ambition and deceit. They’re soulmates of sorts in the best and most toxic sense one can interpret—they have a mutual understanding of each other’s best and worst potential, a tacit acceptance that they’re stronger together, at odds with their dogged egotism. Both are attracted to Pierpoint for its cult of individualism; as Harper tells Eric in her job interview in the first episode, it’s as close to a true meritocracy as you can get. For Eric, an Asian-American man, and Harper, an African-American woman, it’s an escape—from poverty, from feeling persecuted by racism, from doubt. Their chances of moving up from the bottom to the top economic quintile are, as Eric Harper tells us in one of his motivational speeches in the first season, about 3%. “We intimidate people,” he says, “because hunger is not a birthright.”

Much of the series “Industry,” which began as many Americans’ relationship to work and careers was undergoing profound changes, focuses on the theme of mentoring: what values ​​we pass on, how much compromise one makes for success, how relationships, choices and examples shape an institution’s (in this case, corrupt but fascinating) culture. The ouroboros of greed and abuse. Kenny bullies Yasmin without fighting back, and she in turn discourages a recent graduate from disclosing sexual assault for practical reasons. The one time Eric’s manager complimented him, he tells Harper, the praise contained a racial slur. Various senior female managers appeal to solidarity to guide Harper in her own interests; she chooses Eric, who sees her as an equal but also once locked her in a room in anger.

Such intense, contradictory, ineffable bonds—intimate as family, but yet not—are a common byproduct of jobs being confused with meaning, purpose, and identity. Industry is perhaps the most successful recent series about so-called workism, the quasi-religious belief in one’s purpose through a capitalist career, a common thread in what I’ve been calling “hustle culture” shows in recent years: Inventing Anna, WeCrashed, Super Pumped, The Dropout, all of which used famous actors to reenact the most important economic stories of the 2010s. Apple’s critical darling Severance imagined a literal separation of work and home as a dystopian hell, and HBO’s crown jewel Succession managed to depict plenty of boardrooms and still feel like a vulgar Shakespearean family drama. (Notably, all of these series aired in 2022, as did Industry, the year the pandemic’s reckoning with work hit the screen.)

The industry represents one end of the workism spectrum, made up of extreme emotional highs and lows (like most viewers, I have little sense of “short selling” or IPOs, which is nowhere near as important as the characters’ intense feelings about them). But it’s a recognizable end – characters connected by work, navigating a minefield of personalities and agendas to stay in a morally compromised system for the sake of the purpose, status, and money it gives them. It’s not just Pierpoint, or Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce from Mad Men, or the toxic kitchen in The Bear.

After three episodes, the show’s third season, like Succession before it, deals with this trap, the characters stuck and going through endless moral gray areas, a pattern that runs through Eric and Harper’s relationship. One could interpret Eric’s decision to fire Harper in the season two finale as a selfish decision to get rid of his only true rival and thorn in his side; a fearful decision, knowing that Harper will stop at nothing to win; an act of compassion that saves Harper from herself and offers her a way out of illegal insider trading. Most likely all of the above. Still, of course she would come back. She can’t resist.

In the first knockout moment of the outstanding third season so far, she publicly humiliates Eric and pressures him to take on her new fund, co-managed by Sarah Goldberg’s icy Petra, as a client. The mentee has become the boss and dictates the expectations – tailored service, answering every call, Eye contact“Do you know who you’re dealing with here?” he asks Petra, who may or may not understand how desperate Harper is. Eric certainly does, and the vicious circle continues. How exciting to know that no one understands them like they understand each other.