An Ode to Harper Stern

One of TV's most fascinating, layered — and yes, infuriating — characters

Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Short (Whatever That Means)

As someone who has apparently seen over 30,000 episodes of television in my lifetime, I pride myself on being an early adopter of most of the great shows of this generation. So it brings me no joy to come to you readers with my hat in hand and tell you that I was very late on HBO’s Industry. Everything about the promos during season one made it seem like a Skins-ified version of Succession, and even amongst the growing fervor as the show went on, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I could sit this one out. At the start of 2026, I finally gave in and made it my mission to catch up in time for the end of the fourth season, and I’m here to admit that I was wrong. Well, not technically: the show’s provocative impulses and all-roads-lead-to-sex mentality are a little juvenile. But otherwise, it’s a truly incredible work with fantastic character writing, an engaging balance of the personal and professional, and a mastery of rhythm and structure that’s surprising given the creators’ small writing resumes. It’s not quite Succession, but there are few other shows from this decade that are better.

I was lucky enough that two of my close friends* were catching up with it at the same time, and during their journey, they both independently expressed exhaustion and frustration with Harper Stern, the show’s ostensible main character. It’s a sentiment that extrapolates to the larger audience as well — there are scores of people out there who simply can’t stand Harper. In a way, I get it. She’s annoying as hell, a five foot tall gremlin with half of that height coming from the massive chip lodged into her shoulder. But she’s also the show’s most dynamic and complex character, and it’s hard to imagine Industry functioning if she didn’t exist or even was a softer version of herself.

After four seasons, the mission statement of the show, beyond ensuring that viewers will be able to pass their next macroeconomics exam, appears to be asking the question: How would you react if Tony Soprano or Don Draper was a woman? The female antihero is not necessarily a new concept — they began to pop up here and there pretty quickly after the proliferation of the male version in the post-Sopranos boom. But often in those early stages, it was a case like Damages, where the ways in which the main character was an antihero still felt male-coded, and they just happened to cast a woman. In Harper, Industry rebuilds the antihero framework from the ground up, in a manner that feels like it wants to directly engage with how gender alters the way the character is received. (If that’s the case, the closest analogue she has is Amy Jellicoe from HBO’s brilliant cult classic, Enlightened.) Tony Soprano killed multiple friends and quasi-family members, Don Draper stole a man’s identity and treated scores of women like dirt, yet neither of them ever seemed to stoke the collective rage that Harper inspires, even though her most severe crime was something every single Congressperson does.

The answer for that isn’t as boring or simple as misogyny if you ask me. Central to the traditional antihero is that they usually have traits that counterbalance their bad behaviors. For all his faults, Tony Soprano is a very charismatic person, so even if you don’t necessarily like him, his exploits draw you in all the same. Harper is guided by a warped interpretation of Pierpoint’s old “people are our capital” slogan, where friends and strangers alike are nothing more than transactions to her. The idea of exuding charisma might cause her brain to short circuit.

Meanwhile, Don Draper may be an adulterous chauvinist, but he’s damn good at his job. Technically Harper is too, but her talent is much less legible. One of the major roadblocks to getting invested in Industry is the density of its financial jargon. I don’t understand it, you probably don’t understand it, and there’s a chance anyone not named Mickey Down or Konrad Kay doesn’t understand it. That the show is still riveting despite that is a testament to its greatness, but it’s a detriment to Harper. “Don Draper comes up with pretty words to sell a product” is a fairly convincing display of skill to the layman, but if you aren’t an investment banker, you’re often left to just take Industry’s word that Harper is some kind of prodigy. Telling us that she made a market prediction nobody else could have is as good as saying she’s the best at creating an imaginary friend.

In other words, there are no tangible positive qualities to offset Harper’s interpersonal deficiencies. It’s a bold gambit that the showrunners attempt with her, and indeed it’s one that some find hard to accept, but to me it’s thrilling to watch them try to push the limits with her.

What makes her such a fresh character is that she’s simultaneously the distaff version of a classic male archetype and a deconstruction of it. Mad Men's Don has come up alot in this piece, because it’s clear that he’s the main model for Harper. They both have that tortured genius air to them. Both of them tend to use sex as a salve for the pain that aforementioned genius plagues them with. The two are even united by the fact that they ran from their pasts and reinvented themselves with a lie. But Industry uses those parallels to subvert your expectations as well, particularly in season two. In “Short to the Point of Pain,” the season’s sixth episode, Harper attempts a daring play against the interests of Pierpoint, the kind of out-of-the-box move that tended to work well for Don, but instead she falls flat on her face and gets suspended from the desk. This leads to a plot advancement that directly parallels Mad Men’s electric season three finale, “Shut the Door. Have a Seat.”, where she devises a plan to go rogue with Rishi, Eric, and DVD. (Eric even says a variation of that famous episode title to Harper.) But again, unlike Don, Harper crashes and burns.

It’s that self-awareness of its influences that extends to a knowingness about how tough to take Harper can be. Often, this comes out in moments of high conflict, where the script will put the audience’s probable thoughts about Harper in the mouth of whoever is mad at her. This is a device that the best shows tend to use with protagonists like this. In The Sopranos, Tony’s therapy sessions served this function; an easy avenue to highlight and push back on his contradictions and darkest impulses. On Mad Men, these moments generally came from the women in Don’s life, usually around the time things were coming to an end with them (who can forget Dr. Joy’s famous “you only like the beginnings of things” line?). With Industry, it’s frequently in fights with Yasmin, who’s either Harper’s soulmate or her greatest nemesis depending on the day of the week.

Two paper airplanes flying

Harper is such a well-defined and specifically drawn character that you can’t help but lean forward. She’s a person whose desire to seem opaque only makes her more transparent. And the show nails her down pretty early on in a few major ways. The first important one comes all the way in “Sesh,” the show’s fourth episode, where she screws up a trade and compounds that mistake with even more losses. It introduces a crucial layer to her character, where the facade falls down, the imposter syndrome kicks in, and she reverts to being a little girl when backed into a corner. Her estranged brother comes up alot as the Rosetta Stone for her personality early on as well. The detail that he’s her twin is significant, like the show is saying she’s missing a part of herself in his absence. That he doesn’t actually appear until the middle of season two, and when he does, it upends the narrative that Harper has been telling herself and the audience, is another masterstroke in a series full of them.

Most of all, I love the way her Blackness informs her character. Another early telling moment occurs in the fifth episode of season one, where Harper’s ex from back home visits her in the UK, and she code switches when she’s with him; her whole body language and manner of speaking transforming. It also feels deliberate that she’s the only Black woman we ever see at Pierpoint, or any other trading company she’s working at. Even in last night’s season four finale, she remarks to Kwabena that he’s the only Black person she has around to talk to. When you think about all of that, you get why constantly being an outsider would make you feel like you have to do anything to prove yourself and assert the supremacy of your ideas. The problem is that Harper puts it into overdrive, acting as if she’s the only person who’s ever faced adversity, the only person who’s ever been gifted. But when you actually boil her trauma down — essentially, her mom wasn’t nice to her — she’s just as “ordinary” as she accuses Yasmin of being in their big season three blowup. Those naked contradictions only make her more interesting.

If there were any weakness in season four, it was that in the show’s pivot to becoming a corporate espionage thriller, the story put Harper on the backburner in favor of Yasmin’s more direct relationship with Tender. But any doubts were mollified in that astonishing finale, which rendered the shape of Yasmin’s arc more clearly, repositioned Harper in the narrative, and found her in a shocking new place: the moral center of the show. Last week, Industry was renewed for a fifth and final season, and while I have no clue where it’ll take Ms. Stern next, I’m confident she’ll be as fascinating and frustrating as ever.

*Special shout out to Christina Monroe and Michael Leber — discussing the show with them while we were all separately catching up helped me hone the thoughts you see here. This piece would not be the same without them.