How Industry’s Eric and Harper became the most fascinating relationship on TV

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.