Task Represents a Return to the Format Of What Made HBO The Forefront of the Golden Age of TV And Offers Revision and Redemption in A Way So Much Hasn't

 

One of the overriding links of the HBO dramas that started the revolution back in the late 1990s and put them at the forefront of it well into the 2010s was the dirtiness and griminess of the holy trinity of great dramas.  Whether it was the seedy underbelly of the strip clubs in Tony Soprano's New Jersey,  the darkness under every part of David Simon's Baltimore, or the camp itself in Deadwood the three classics never let us forget the darkness was there both on the surface as well as under it.

This darkness was at the center of almost every masterpiece of a drama in HBO from 1997 up until the start of the 2010s. We saw it every moment we were in OZ, we never forgot that Six Feet Under was all about death,  we saw in every moment of Rome, it was where Bill Henrickson had escaped from to suburbia and it was everywhere in David Simon's follow-up to The Wire, Treme. Some shows were better than others but all of them had the underbelly of darkness, particularly among the working-class men and women who inhabited every aspect of it.

Starting with True Blood, HBO began to shift away from this urban, working class America in its drama to either pure fantasy worlds or an examination of the highest markers of the food chain.  It's hard to argue the merit in that decision: while I may be far from the biggest fans of Game of Thrones, Succession or Euphoria, all three dramas were both critical and increasing audience hits. But after Boardwalk Empire came to an end in 2014 HBO would basically spend the 2010s and well into this decade far more with the upper crust then the working classes.

Perhaps that's why during the 2010s most of my favorite dramas inhabited the world that was closer to that established by HBO during the 2000s. I speak not just of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, but also such works as Ryan Murphy's Pose, the masterpiece The Americans which used suburban life as a cover for an infiltration of a foreign power into DC life and Mr. Robot which showed how Eliot's mind would fracture on the desire to bring down so many of the kinds of people that those at Waystar Royco would hang out with on a daily basis.

I won't deny that the best dramas to this point on HBO during this new decade are set very much among the world of privileged and upper crust, whether it watching the struggles between old and new money in The Gilded Age or the increasingly bad behavior of the guests at The White Lotus.  But a part of me has wonder if HBO was ever going to return to the seamy underbelly that made its first waves of shows so iconic. And there have been signs in the past year that seems to be at least part of the plan.

It was seen last year with The Penguin which used the story of one of the most iconic villains in comic book history to tell a saga that was very much the origin story of the kinds of characters we'd spent so much time meeting during The Sopranos and OZ.  The Pitt which won the Emmy for Best Drama this year has us spending an entire season at an underfunded, overcrowded emergency room in Pittsburgh where an overloaded group of professionals try to deal with the horrors of American life. And this past few months we have witness Brad Inglesby's Task which in many ways is a return to the format that we saw the three Davids make legendary in the 2000s but has so many twists on all of them, many which make you feel optimistic about the world at the end of them.

Spoilers for the first season of Task follow

This is familiar territory for Inglesby who introduced to this part of run-down Philadelphia so brilliantly in Mare Of Easttown in the spring of 2021.  There are similar themes in both shows: the central character was once someone who had great potential in their lives and a combination of  family tragedy and trauma have forced them to take a job they throw themselves into to deny the realities of their day to day life. Mare and Tom Brandis are both barely functioning at the start of both Mare and Task. Both have essentially surrendered care of their families to others (in Tom's case, Emma is essentially raising herself while he drinks himself to oblivion every night) and both are barely functioning at their jobs. It is only when a horrific event takes place in their community than both of them throw themselves into it; even though those around them are more than aware of how ill-suited they are to it.

Unlike Mare of Easttown Task divides its time between the criminal element and the law enforcement community chasing them. And it is worth noting that Robbie (Tom Pelphrey) is not just the other side of the same coin as Tom (he is struggling to get over the loss of both his brother and his wife's abandonment of him) but to an extent so are every major character we see connected with the Dark Hearts.

In my initial review I argued that Robbie was not as interesting because he was no mastermind. I now realize that I misread the situation. Robbie had been the good brother, the one who had gotten out and lived an ordinary life. He only went on his spree of robbing stash houses as part of a plan to get revenge on Jayson, the leader of the Dark Hearts because he'd been responsible for killing his brother the previous year. The irony is that his brother was basically irredeemable in the first place. Indeed an argument could be made that everything that follows is because Billy basically chose to have an affair with Jason's wife and was planning to blow up both their families so that he could be happy. We saw that Robbie had tried to warn him of the fire he was playing with in a flashback and was in a sense being manipulated by Eryn who was giving him the information and allowing him to rob the Dark Hearts because she wanted to the bosses to kill Jayson – which indeed was going to happen had events not intervened.

Robbie serves as an interesting counterpoint to what was the thesis of both The Sopranos and The Wire. In the former David Chase argued that given the chance, every single person will make the easy choice rather than the hard one; in the latte Simon argued that both cops, criminals and everyone in Baltimore will forsake long-term safety for short-term success. Robbie knows what the easy choice when he sees Sam but because he's not a killer he doesn't take it. As the walls continue to close in around him, he continues to double down on plans that become more and more dangerous. It is only at the end of the series that we realize he was a better person then anyone else expected: he was willing to sacrifice his life and his future so that his family could have a better one. We've seen so many characters in the 21^st century die for what are essentially pointless and selfish reason; it's rare to see someone do so for what is essentially an unselfish one. It gives a nobility to Robbie's actions that I've seen so little of during the era of Peak TV.

It's worth noting that Jayson (Sam Keeley) is a man who is unfit for leadership of any gang: he is governed entirely by his emotions and doesn't think before he acts. He's also so blinded by his feelings that he never thinks that the leak is the mother of his children or that she might even want to see him dead considering he killed the man she loved. He constantly hides these facts from Perry (Jamie McShane) the man who fought for him taking the lead of the chapter and who's trying everything possible to keep him alive. It's not so much a shock that Task is about everything he built collapsing; it's a surprise he's kept it together this long.

Perry is similarly blinded by his devotion to Jayson and most of his actions are a parallel to Robbie's. He knows what the easy choice is as early as the fourth episode: to cut bait with Jayson as soon as the FBI becomes involved. But his devotion to Jayson continues to blind him and his choices become increasingly heavy handed; he ends up accidentally killing Eryn, he can't stop Jayson's quest to revenge on Robbie and what he thinks should be his and he can't bring himself to kill Jayson even though it's the only way he'll survive. That with his last breath he feels compelled to warn Jayson is not so much nobility as a man who is pot committed to a losing hand.

And we see this paralleled in the actions of Grasso (Fabien Frankel) a good working class cop who we learn in the fifth episode is the mole within the task force. As things keep unfolding Grasso naively thinks he can keep his two worlds separate and escape both with his life and no one else getting hurt. This leads to the gun battle at the bridge which ends with Elizabeth (Alison Oliver) essentially becoming an innocent bystander. Grasso tries to put up  a brave face when Tom confronts him in the penultimate episode but in the finale we see how badly its rattled him. He is already planning to come forward before his superior comes to kill him and the resulting shootout leaves him severely but not mortally wounded. He makes a valiant effort to redeem himself in that final episode but not even he thinks there is real hope.

The women in Task also face difficult choices in their lives. We've seen how Aleah (Thuso Mbedu) has been a victim of domestic violence in her past and may be the only person on this force who wants true justice and is qualified for it. And the best character in this show Maeve (Emilia Jones) is the only character who has a true moral compass throughout: the only one who knows what the right thing to do is and is determined to do it, who acknowledges that her fear has dominated her at the wrong time. That she is allowed a happy ending and a clean break is one of the true joys of the series.

All of this is fascinating and lends itself to great drama. But what makes Task unique – certainly among HBO dramas of the 21^st century – is that the end of it we have a white male hero at the center after so many years of watching bad men do bad things over and over and we spend our lives watching their darkness.  Tom is struggling from a horrible loss from the start: the fact that his wife was killed by his son in what was a schizophrenic break from reality when his medication was short. He's spent the previous year refusing to see his son, leaving his daughter to parent herself, unwilling to try and deal with his problems. It's not just that he's lost his wife but that he's lost God as well.

The task force shows over and over what a strong leader Tom is, how good a moral compass he is, how caring he is about what happens to the agents under him. He cares about the life of the missing child; he wants to stop further violence and in that magnificent scene with Robbie in episode 5 we see just how alike they are.  That he makes an effort to save the life of a man who held him at gunpoint gives him a nobility we wouldn't see in so many procedurals before. That he is willing to let Maeve escape with the money when it should have been evidence shows a good heart.

All of this would be powerful enough but what sells it his decision as to what to do about Ben in the season finale. We've seen Tom wrestle with the trauma of it all season; we've seen him put the burden of the impact statement on Emily and how she's been struggling with it, we see how its divided his family. Now at the end of the episode, we see him choose to read the impact statement and finally explain to both the judge and to us why every element of this horrific tragedy happened, how much he misses his wife and how he has found a way towards forgiveness, something he didn't think he could find in him to offer at the start of the series.

And in this Tom becomes a hero in a different way because for the first time in I don't know how long we see a male lead of an HBO drama trying to be a genuinely good father and succeeding.  From Tony Soprano to Logan Roy HBO has been filled with men who are severely lacking it being good father figures and we haven't seen much better models in The White Lotus or The Last of Us this year.  Now Mark Ruffalo gives us a man who is doing the right thing even though it’s the hardest thing possible. Not once but twice when he chooses to give up Sam as a conservator to a foster family because he knows that's the best thing for everybody including himself.

The idea of the hero's journey may be a cliched one but I have to say during the 21^st century I've rarely seen it explored on television outside the boundaries of network TV. Tom's journey on Task might not be the reverse of Breaking Bad's mission statement – Scarface becoming Mr. Chips – but how many times have you see any cable drama where the lead character is in a genuinely better place at the end of the series then it started?

I realize I may be speaking a bit hastily about that. But it is worth noting that HBO has announced Task will compete in the drama categories rather then the limited series awards at the end of the year and for the Emmys. And unlike with Mare of Easttown where Inglesby was cryptic about doing a second season, he has openly said he hopes to do another one. Considering that the ratings have been just an impressive as the critical response, I think its likely HBO will be willing to indulge him.

I should be clear that despite all this I'm not entirely convinced I'll put Task on my top ten list this year. While this is a superb show there are just not enough things for me to embrace it the same way I have so many of other dramas that will be on this list, including so many of this year's crop of HBO dramas that definitely will be. And while Inglesby's writing is masterful, there were too many times I thought the direction was a distraction as well as too many philosophical digressions that I admired more than I felt natural.

But make no mistake if and when Task comes back for a second season I will be the first to watch it. As a limited series there are things in it that I don't think make it a classic. As the first season of a new kind of HBO drama, it has the makings of an all-time great.