“It’s easy to talk about forgiveness and mercy when it’s not your loss,” Mark Ruffalo wearily says in the new HBO series “Task,” and with that, writer/creator Brad Ingelsby effectively lays down the heavy emotional gauntlet for what will be more than just a crime drama, true to his métier.
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Wracked with guilt, hollowed by sorrow, and weighed down by demons of failure, inadequacy, and bitter resentment, writer/creator Ingelsby’s follow-up to “Mare of Easttown”—the acclaimed, Emmy-winning HBO series—operates in a familiar register where the personal and procedural intertwine. While ‘Mare’ centered on a single mother detective whose trauma intersected with the murder of a young woman, “Task” is less a whodunnit mystery and more a slow-burning cat-and-mouse story, pitting a spiritually drained FBI agent against a desperate father-turned-criminal.
But unlike, say, Michael Mann’s “Heat,” there are no slick, mythologized professionals locked in a duel of equals. Instead, the two men at the heart of “Task”—an excellent Mark Ruffalo and Tom Pelphrey (“Mank,” “Ozark”)—are tethered by wounds and disappointments, the kinds of scars that gradually expose how much more alike they are than the actual criminals in their orbit. Beneath the crime-drama trappings lies Ingelsby’s deeper preoccupation: faith, its unraveling, and the spiritual disquiet left behind when belief erodes.
Ruffalo plays Tom Brandis, a former priest turned FBI agent, tasked with leading a makeshift unit investigating a string of violent robberies in the working-class suburbs of Philadelphia (Ingelsby’s recurring, well-worn milieu). Haunted by the death of his wife, Susan (Mireille Enos), and consumed by a broader crisis of conviction, Tom abandoned the priesthood but never escaped the void it left behind. Now he numbs himself with vodka, Phillies games, and birdwatching, while his fractured family life—an estranged adopted daughter Emily (Silvia Dionicio), her incarcerated twin brother Ethan (Andrew Russel), and adult daughter Sara (Phoebe Fox)—drifts further out of reach.
Across town, Robbie Prendergast (Pelphrey) works sanitation by day and stages robberies by night, targeting stash houses belonging to the Dark Hearts motorcycle gang. His wife has left him, his brother Billy was murdered, and his sense of self has disintegrated into purposelessness. His niece Maeve (Emilia Jones) has been forced into the role of surrogate parent for Robbie’s two young children, while Robbie spirals deeper into recklessness with the help of his wayward partner Cliff (Raúl Castillo).
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Reluctant to return to field duty, Tom is pulled back in when Robbie’s robberies turn violent and public. His worn-out boss Kathleen McGinty (Martha Plimpton) orders him to assemble a task force: county detective Anthony Grasso (Fabien Frankel), Philadelphia sergeant Aleah Clinton (Thuso Mbedu), and state trooper Lizzie Stover (Alison Oliver), whose inexperience and lack of discipline make her a liability. Underfunded and undermanned, the unit is far from elite, but Tom is forced to work with what he’s given. Even Grasso—the sharpest and most dependable of Tom’s recruits—carries his own scars, having lost faith in a system he long ago recognized as rigged beyond repair. Meanwhile, the Dark Hearts, led by Perry (Jamie McShane) and his volatile lieutenant Jayson (Sam Keeley), circle in, threatening to ignite a war that will put Robbie’s family in the crosshairs.
But the most riveting confrontation comes when Tom and Robbie are finally drawn into each other’s trajectory. Both men are adrift—Tom untethered from the faith and family that once anchored him, Robbie flailing in the absence of purpose or identity—and that sense of loss becomes the current that binds them. Ingelsby doesn’t wait until the final chapter for this reckoning; instead, he wisely lets their paths converge earlier, allowing the series to steep in their uneasy recognition of shared ruin and fractured hope.
If “Mare of Easttown” offered Ingelsby’s definitive portrait of community and mourning, and Derek Cianfrance’s “I Know This Much Is True” (also starring Ruffalo) burrowed into harrowing familial torment, “Task” lands somewhere in between. While it may sound dour on the surface, it never plunges into the outright bleakness of either of those HBO dramas. Instead, the show locates its atmosphere in a more moody, haunted, and ruminative key—serious, yes, but never suffocating. The disillusioned working-class Pennsylvania setting, Catholic guilt, and generational ache may feel familiar, but Ingelsby’s gift is making them feel authentic, never recycled. His dialogue rings true, his characters pulse with hurt, and his settings breathe with the weight of history.
That vision is enhanced by the series’ direction, split between Jeremiah Zagar (“We the Animals”) and Salli Richardson-Whitfield (“Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty”), both of whom bring a tactile, lived-in style that grounds the show in everyday textures while maintaining narrative propulsion. Composer Dan Deacon contributes a wonderfully restrained score—brooding, atmospheric, and never tipping its hand toward his reputation as an electronic provocateur—while cinematographer Alex Disenhof (“Watchmen,” “The Mosquito Coast”) stitches together the character-driven action with cohesion and clarity, finding poetry in shadow and silence.
Ingelsby, who takes on most of the writing himself, works in classic form here: poignant, filled with characters weighed down by melancholy, and empathetic to everyone’s plight. No one has it easy in “Task,” and the series never tips into judgment or tidy moral binaries. What emerges is an ensemble of wounded souls—cops, criminals, family members alike—all navigating a fractured world with little more than scar tissue to guide them. Actors like Isaach De Bankolé, Owen Teague, Margarita Levieva, and Mickey Sumner round out a deeply impressive supporting cast, but the show ultimately lives and dies by its two central figures.
Ruffalo and Pelphrey are the twin engines here, mirror images circling each other on opposite sides of the law. Ruffalo, as always, is compelling as a man wrung by loss, tender and raw yet never overplaying the grief. Pelphrey, meanwhile, continues to prove why filmmakers like David Fincher and actor/producers like Josh Brolin want to collaborate with him, why he’s already in demand and an Emmy nominee. He brings a combustible mix of volatility and vulnerability, a live wire whose quiet moments are as riveting as his eruptions. Together, they elevate “Task” into something that resonates far beyond its procedural frame.
Ultimately, “Task” is less procedural than the corrosion of belief systems. For Ruffalo’s Tom, it is a crisis of faith born from betrayals and private tragedies too heavy to reconcile; for Pelphrey’s Robbie, it is the sense of purpose stripped away by abandonment and loss; for Grasso, it is the bitter disillusionment of a justice system that has long since failed him. Their encounters are tragic, human, and profoundly affecting—a testament to Ingelsby’s ability to find bruised lyricism in ruin.
What lingers in “Task” is not the cases themselves but the portrait of men and women drifting through the wreckage of institutions, families, and creeds that no longer sustain them, all straining toward something—anything—that might restore a sense of meaning. That, of course, is Ingelsby’s hallmark: his compassion for splintered, working-class lives, his refusal to avert his gaze from the quiet devastations that shape them, and his ability to dramatize the fragile search for renewal in a world that offers little solace. With “Task,” he delivers another hurt, elegiac story—one that finds Tom stumbling toward a kind of redemption, shadowed by loss yet still reaching for the faint glimmer of grace that might lie on the other side. [A-]