For his HBO follow-up to Mare of Easttown, writer Brad Ingelsby doesn’t stray far with Task, another police procedural laced with familial drama that’s set in a Pennsylvania neighborhood where kids work at Rita’s during the summer and no one knows how to properly pronounce the word “water.”
This time around, Mark Ruffalo is the miserable law enforcement officer balancing professional and domestic troubles, although it’s Tom Pelphrey as a tormented thief in a mess of his own making who truly invigorates these otherwise by-the-books proceedings. His frazzled and desperate performance outshines everything else in Ingelsby’s latest, and if it can’t compensate for the show’s shortcomings, it nonetheless makes it worth sticking with until (almost) the end.
“I kneow these roawds like the back of my haend,” says Robbie (Pelphrey) in the Philly-ese that dominates Task, premiering September 7. His familiarity with his hometown extends to the drug houses which regularly move product and money.
A sanitation worker, Robbie and his colleague and buddy Cliff (Raúl Castillo), as well as their goofy pal Peaches (Owen Teague), spend their evenings robbing narcotics dealers of their cash (à la Apple TV+’s recent Dope Thief).
Wearing masks and using intel provided by an anonymous source, they’re smash-and-grab artists using their illicit gains to fund their lives. That’s a necessity for Robbie, whose wife has left him and who now resides with his two children, Harper (Kennedy Moyer) and Wyatt (Oliver Eisenson), and his 21-year-old niece Maeve (Coda’s Emilia Jones), a local arcade employee who functions as the unit’s de facto mother figure.
Robbie has a good thing going with his fleecing-criminals scheme—too good, actually, since his successes attract the attention of the FBI.
With seven of the nine targeted houses belonging to the notorious Black Hearts motorcycle gang, which controls the state’s rural dope trade, federal bigwig Kathleen McGinty (Martha Plimpton) is ordered to assemble a task force to end this spree before it escalates into war.
To lead the unit, she selects Tom (Ruffalo), a priest-turned-agent who’s lately been pushing recruitment pamphlets and flyers at a career fair. Tom has little interest in returning to the field, but he begrudgingly accepts his assignment and his team members, who include chaotic state trooper Lizzie (Alison Oliver), sharpshooting sergeant detective Aleah (Thuso Mbedu), and organized crime vet Anthony (Fabien Frankel)—a motley crew that’s given a ramshackle country house as their base of operations.
For Tom, this is horrid timing, since his foster son Ethan (Andrew Russel) is about to be sentenced for an unthinkable offense. This has left not only Tom a wreck, but also his foster daughter Emily (Silvia Dionicio), who lives with him, and biological daughter Sara (Phoebe Fox), who’s flown in for this stressful event.
Up for debate is whether anyone is going to deliver a family impact statement on Ethan’s behalf, and the fact that Emily has thoughts of doing so simply widens the rift growing between these formerly tight relatives. Everyone is angry, grief-stricken and lost, and Tom, who was a man of the cloth before joining the FBI, is profoundly upset that his nightly prayers go unanswered and that mercy is something he can’t bestow upon himself or his son.
Tom’s struggle to forgive is underlined at the start of Task, such that the show’s destination is all but telegraphed by its opening passages.
Ingelsby’s series is hampered by obvious themes and predictable action, not to mention standard-issue characters; from the world-weary and boozy Tom, to biker gang baddie Jayson (Sam Keeley) and his superior Perry (Jamie McShane), both of whom were Black Hearts comrades with Robbie’s now-dead brother Billy. Add in the aggravated and put-upon Maeve, and this story’s players are a routine lot. Still, they’re drawn sharply and the cast’s turns are solid, with Ruffalo and Jones doing their best to bring a measure of nuance and heart to their protagonists’ anxious anguish.
Task shifts into gear when Robbie, Cliff, and Peaches’ latest heist goes haywire, resulting in multiple deaths and Robbie making a drastic decision to prevent word getting out about the massacre. Setting aside its stupidity, Robbie’s fateful choice ups Task’s suspenseful ante, creating numerous complications for the thief, Maeve, and the FBI agents who are trying to put a stop to this madness.
At the same time, Ingelsby draws subtle parallels between Robbie and Tom’s personal situations, both of which have to do with (literal and figurative) families being torn apart from the inside. For every heavy-handed maneuver, there’s an understated gesture, and while that push-pull makes this saga intermittently frustrating, it also keeps it taut and engaging.
In its fifth episode, Task generates the thrills it’s been promising from the get-go, courtesy of an expertly executed and nerve-wracking all-roads-lead-to-the-woods showdown between feds, crooks, and innocents caught in the crossfire.
The problem is that in the aftermath of this showstopper, one-and-a-half episodes remain, and though there are various loose ends to tie up, they’re relatively anticlimactic and wind up stretching the material thin. From a structural standpoint, this is a considerable miscalculation, rendering the finale underwhelming and suggesting, in the process, that there wasn’t enough vital plot to fill out seven installments.
Pelphrey can’t prop up Task’s home stretch, yet his compelling performance remains the most gripping aspect of Task. With a scruffy beard, arms and neck covered in tats, and a look of exhausted and harried fear in his eyes, Robbie resonates as a kindred spirit to the actor’s wayward Ozark wild card Ben, his good intentions offset by his self-destructiveness.
Even when there’s no doubt about his downward trajectory, Pelphrey’s two-bit bandit is a loser who’s easy to root for, and Ingelsby gives him just enough distinctive touches—such as his habit of touching his shoulders with cold water before jumping into an icy quarry lake—to delineate him from his myriad fictional ancestors. As such, he’s more captivating than Ruffalo’s Tom, a beleaguered cop cut from an unoriginal mold.
Boasting sporadic sparks of electricity, most of them generated by Pelphrey, Task trades in issues of loyalty and betrayal, damnation and salvation, and vengeance and forgiveness. Transcending its clichés to say something bracing about those topics, however, is a task Ingelsby’s tale can’t quite accomplish.
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