Much as I appreciated and admired Mare
of Easttown in the spring of 2021, unlike so many viewers I wasn't crying
out for a second season. Big Little
Lies is the exception to the rule that not every great limited series
requires the story to go past the ending. And as the 2025-2026 season
unofficially began two weeks ago I looked forward to Brad Inglesby's follow-up
project for HBO Task which is set in the same part of Philadelphia that
was in his first project but in a vastly darker and potentially more interested
world than the one Kate Winslet inhabited.
Mark Ruffalo returns to the same
network which has brought him so much Emmy recognition in the past, most
notably his Best Actor Award for I Know This Much Is True. In this
series he plays Special Agent Tom Brandis, with a grizzled beard and even more
sorrow in him then before. Tom is upfront a more interesting character than
Mare was: he was a former Episcopal priest who served as a chaplain during
crisis events such as Oklahoma City but left the priesthood when he met his
wife. In 2003 he went into Quantico and has been a special agent. He is the
father of a daughter by birth and two adopted children, but notably at the
start of the series only Emily (Silvia Dionicio) is still living with him. By
the second episode we learn the nature of what has wrecked both Tom and his
family: Emily's brother was schizophrenic and in the midst of his episode he
pushed Tom's wife down the stairs and broke her neck. He's been convicted of
murder in the third degree and Tom has been unable to see him since.
Emily, it's worth noting, has been
basically absent from the home since then mainly because she has been trying to
escape the horrors of what has happened. She loves her brother very much and
she knows his illness caused this. The problem is she's clearly in the process
of choosing him over what he did to the rest of the family. Tom has been
destroyed since then; in the pilot he gets drunk and has to be helped up the
stairs. This has become a regular occurrence in the Brandis household but Emily
has been unwilling to do anything to actually made her father's life easier.
And it has clearly broken Tom's grip on the world. He gave up God for his wife
and now he has neither. All that he has is his job and he's been on a leave of
absence since then.
There couldn't be a worse time for Tom
to be called back on duty and yet his ASAC (Martha Plimpton in a small role)
calls him back to head a task force to look at a string of home invasions that
have involved a series of robberies of stash houses of a major motorcycle gang
that is responsible for the biggest drug distribution in the Eastern United
States. The force Tom is given is frankly less promising then the one that was
assembled in the first season of The Wire: Maeve (Emilia Jones) who
can't even get her email open and doesn't know what she's doing, Anthony Grasso
(Fabien Frankel) who knows certain things about the gang leadership then the
others and Aleah Clinton (The Underground Railroad's Thuso Mbedu) who
barely seems capable of following the lead. Tom knows this is a lousy job and
he's basically given a shack as base
that he puts his best effort to reconstruct but still has mice
everywhere.
Ruffalo is magnificent in every scene
he's in, no matter whether he's taking the role as an FBI agent, a broken
father, or looking for God. And that may
be the biggest flaw with Task, at least after two episodes. This is
supposed to be a story where we spend as much time with the criminal as the man
pursuing him and see just how alike both men are. The trouble is that when it
comes to Robbie Prendergrast, the man behind the robberies, it's not even close
to an equal footing as to who has the more interesting and competent character.
This is not the fault so much of Tom
Pelphrey, a usually brilliant actor who can often find darkness and depths when
he's given something to work with. (He did so quite well in his last
collaboration with HBO, the undervalued limited series of Love and Death.)
I suspect the problem has to do with Inglesby and just not being good enough at
writing about criminals. Mare of
Easttown worked exceptionally well because it was a whodunnit and spent his
time dealing as much with the characters in
Mare's orbit who were basically ordinary people. Inglesby tries to hard to give Robbie to much
motivation and it undercuts the character.
Robbie, as we are coming to learn, was
a member of the Black Kings at point along with his brother. His brother was
beaten to death as an example to the organization leaving his wife a widow. Not long after that Robbie's
wife left him and he has essentially abandoned his children to his
sister-in-law Elizabeth (Alison Oliver) so he can work with his gang of three
robbing the various stash houses for what appears a combination of Robin Hood
and revenge.
The problem is that Elizabeth from the
start comes across infinitely more sympathetic and relatable than not only
Robbie but everyone else in the series. Robbie has essentially abandoned her
and she has been living in denial about what's happening but he thinks the
house she lives in is his and that he has rights that he shouldn't. In the
first episode when Alison brings a date home, he's hiding in the closet and he
leaps out to be the would-be beau to a pulp. Elizabeth calls him out on what
he's doing and he tells her "It's my house!" The fact that the home
went to Elizabeth when his brother died is something he refuses to acknowledge
to her. He doesn't think he owes Elizabeth anything, not even an explanation.
And that becomes clear after the events of the first episode.
In the middle of a stash house
robbery, one of Robbie's crew is killed and they kill three people there. At
the time, there's a seven year old boy present, a child who's been neglected.
Robbie's completely ridiculous reaction (one that his cohort Cliff argues) is
to take the boy named Sam home, say he's a friend of their family and
essentially leave him for Elizabeth to take care with her children. The fact
this child's face is now all over the news and that he has put an even bigger
target on his back is something he chooses to ignore; that they have no cash
but 12 kilos of fentanyl that are becoming harder to move is another problem.
Essentially Tom has endangered everybody he loves and he clearly doesn't have a
plan. Walter White he isn't.
This flaw is the only reason I can't
unquestionably rave about Task which in every other level is a
masterpiece. The direction is superb in
a way I'm not usually aware of it and it sets the mood perfectly, whether its
watching a funeral procession of motorcycles or in building tension for a scene
where Elizabeth calls 9-1-1, leaves Sam to be found, gets back in her car –
only to find Sam has snuck back in just as the red-and-blues arrive. The
relationships between the biker gang leader Jayson (Sam Keeley) and his
surrogate father Perry is well done and ironically shows the strongest family
relationship in the series so far. All
of the other performances, including the children (who have a larger role in a
limited series than I've seen in a very long time) are all spot on in their
work. Only the character of Robbie
remains a drag on the show to this point.
Task is about deeper philosophical
questions and one could argue Tom is the other side of so many of the
protagonists we get in True Detective during the 2010s. Tom once
believed in something bigger than himself and now tragedy has made his life a
misery. "I looked the God for answers and prayed for forgiveness," he
tells his daughter. "And all I got was silence." The loss of faith is
something I haven't seen in the overwhelming majority of dramas during this
era: most characters are either unbelievers or use it as a false flag. Tom
believed in something once and for all his flaws Robbie still does. That's a
deeper philosophical struggle then I've seen on TV in any series.
Right now Task is a very good
limited series that has the potential to be a great one. Whether it can rise
itself to surpass the always high-standards of HBO dramas remains to be seen.
It may take until we reach the final episode to know for sure but either way
I'm glad Inglesby chose to bring us hear rather than another trip to Easttown.
My score: 4 stars.
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