In the HBO series “Task,” whose first season concluded last month, Mark Ruffalo plays Tom Brandis, an F.B.I. agent investigating the disappearance of a young boy and a string of drug thefts tied to a biker gang.
The agent also carries heavy baggage: His adopted son is in prison for murdering Tom’s wife.
Would it really be a prestige 21st century television procedural if the investigator at its center wasn’t forlorn about his home life?
For decades, detectives and other investigators have been portrayed on television and in films as brilliant at their jobs. But with that brilliance has come incompetence outside of work as they struggle to maintain marriages, friendships, healthy relationships with alcohol and, really, healthy relationships with anything or anyone.
Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) of “The Wire”? An alcoholic philanderer who once used his children to help tail a drug lord. Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz) of “NYPD Blue”? A divorced alcoholic. Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet) of “Mare Of Easttown”? Her son has died by suicide and her drug-addicted daughter-in-law is trying to snatch custody of her grandson. (Brad Ingelsby, who created “Task,” also created “Mare of Easttown.”) Sherlock Holmes? A rude loner with no friends. Except for Dr. Watson, of course.
In short, you almost never see a detective cut out of work to take the kids to baseball practice, or be home for pizza night.
Some of this stems from the nature of detective work itself, which can expose officers to significant trauma, and the perception among writers of how detectives internalize their day-to-day.
“It’s the worst moments of life, not the best moments of life,” Tony Callisto, a former chief deputy sheriff in Onondaga County, N.Y., said in an interview. “Especially for folks who are special victims investigators.”
The longer officers probe abuse cases — “the worst of humankind,” as Callisto said — “the more impact there is.” But, he added, the way detectives have often been depicted onscreen is over dramatized.
“I would argue that, in most cases, the stable family lives of folks that I’ve worked with, and certainly in my own experience, contributes greatly to their ability to succeed on the job,” Callisto said.
There is an obvious reason screenwriters give detectives tortured back stories: It creates more drama.
“You want dramatic tension across the board, and also I just don’t believe that anybody has a completely perfect home life,” Chandni Lakhani, a creator of the Netflix series “Dept. Q.” (In that show, Carl Morck, a rude detective, survived a shooting in which his partner was paralyzed, and he is struggling to manage a fraught relationship with his wayward stepson.)
Detectives have been central figures in works of fiction since the early 20th century, when crime investigating was becoming a more established profession. For the most part, though, their personal lives were unseen in print, left out of the back story by design.
As Raymond Chandler, a pioneer of the hard-boiled detective novel, wrote: “The whole point is that the detective exists complete and entire and unchanged by anything that happens, that he is, as detective, outside the story and above it, and always will be. That is why he never gets the girl, never marries, never really has any private life, except insofar as he must eat and sleep and have a place to leave his clothes.”
Readers of mystery novels started getting peeks into detectives’ home lives in the latter-half of the 20th century. One of the first novels to offer one was the 1965 Swedish novel “Roseanna,” by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, which introduced the mournful detective Martin Beck, who is unhappily married to his wife but happily married to the job. (Beck would appear in several more novels, as well as television and film adaptations.)
“That was the beginning of treating detectives, and especially police officers, as real humans,” said Mary Bendel-Simso, the author, with LeRoy Lad Panek, of “The Essential Elements of the Detective Story, 1820-1891.”
Television viewers embraced procedurals, just as readers had. Detective shows became formulaic celebrations of law enforcement, largely focused on investigators solving cases. In the 1970s, there was “Columbo” and “The Rockford Files.” The 1990s brought about grittier series, such as “Law & Order,” “NYPD Blue” and “Homicide: Life on the Street.” (Frank Pembleton, the detective in “Homicide” played by Andre Braugher, is happily married — a rarity.)
It wasn’t until the 2000s that screenwriters began to reveal more about the personal lives of police officers. While “The Wire” focused on the battle between the police and the criminal underworld in Baltimore, audiences saw larger glimpses of main characters struggling with parenting and marriage. David Simon, the show’s creator, based the show in part on the 12 years he spent covering the police for The Baltimore Sun. But in an interview, Simon argued that the detectives on “The Wire” had varied home lives — and that the ones who carried baggage didn’t do so because of the job but rather because of who they were as people. From Simon’s perspective, humans are messy by nature.
“There’s no more emotive costs than there might be to a funeral director who’s running a funeral, who has a stranger come in for a funeral,” Simon said. He added that he “found that part of police dramas on television” to be nonsense, though he used an unprintable vulgarity.
But Simon’s intentions with his own show notwithstanding, the prestige television era ushered in a more hard-boiled style of detective storytelling. Among the first shows to make a detective’s home life as much a part of the plot as the case was “The Killing” — both the original Danish version, which premiered in 2007, and the American adaptation, created by Veena Sud and introduced in 2011.
The show was groundbreaking in subtle ways. In the American version, Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos), a detective investigating the murder of a teenage girl in Seattle, is a woman with baggage. Having grown up in foster homes, she is a single parent, and — spoiler alert — she is having an affair with a fellow police officer who ends up being a serial killer.
Sud said she spent years embedded with homicide detectives and undercover officers to research the show. For female detectives, she said, “sustaining a home life is almost impossible.”
“One theme that I saw over and over, and is there, is very little that compares to the adrenaline of chasing murder,” Sud said. “Going home to change the kid’s diapers and do the dishes and cook the meal falls away really quick when you are on a 24-7 investigation.”
The murder that drives the plot, she said, “was an excuse to get to know the people, both the detectives and the family of the people who were left behind.”
The success of “The Killing,” and the prestige television boom, inspired similarly styled shows, so much so that it has become a trope: A talented detective, or a duo, investigates a gruesome crime while one or both of them are navigating a challenging home life. Examples include several iterations of “True Detective,” the British drama “Broadchurch” and the Danish Netflix show “The Chestnut Man.”
Melissa Chen, a London-based tech executive, made light of this on X recently, in response to a widely shared photo of a well-dressed young man who many speculated was investigating the real-life Louvre heist. (He turned out to be a 15-year-old passer-by.) There was no way, she noted, that an attractive, put-together gentleman could solve the case: “We need an unshaven, overweight, washed-out detective who’s in the middle of divorce,” she wrote. “A functioning alcoholic who the rest of the department hates.”
The latest example of the genre is “Task.” In recent years, the television industry has shifted away from the gritty, dimly lit dramas that were popular in the 2010s, in part because of cost and declining viewership. Procedurals are in demand again. But not to worry: Complex investigators with messy home lives are, too.
“A character without conflict,” Sud said, “and a character who has nowhere to go is not a character that anybody wants to watch.”
Sopan Deb is a Times reporter covering breaking news and culture.
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