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This HBO Miniseries Gets Rural America Right

October 19, 2025
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This HBO Miniseries Gets Rural America Right
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Ever since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, television executives and creators have been faced with the notion that maybe they don’t understand the rest of the country after all — and left them grappling with how to better tell the stories of rural and red state Americans. They’ve struggled to cater to viewers who think that the economy and the country have been passing them by, and who don’t see their lives or values reflected on shows set on the coasts, like “The Studio,” “And Just Like That …” or “Euphoria.”

A few TV creators have tackled this challenge well: “The Conners,” a reboot of “Roseanne,” was one of the rare TV revivals to actually feel more relevant to its moment than the original series. The producer who’s been by far the most commercially successful at mining this MAGA-friendly territory is Taylor Sheridan, who helped create dramas like “Yellowstone,” about Montana ranch owners, and “Landman,” about an oil executive in Texas. Many of Mr. Sheridan’s champions view him as the bard of Mr. Trump’s America, a creator whose shows seem intended to celebrate a bygone era while ignoring the most inequitable, regrettable parts of our past.

But there are several current series — set in as geographically and politically disparate locales as the rural back roads of Delaware County, Pa., and the city streets of Tulsa, Okla. — that have taken a different, more intriguing approach to the task of telling these stories. Together, these series’ creators have embraced an approach that’s very different from Mr. Sheridan’s, and that suggests a stronger command of this territory, in both theme and geography.

The first such show, “Task,” an HBO procedural mini-series, is set in Pennsylvania and concludes its seven-episode run Sunday night. In the first episode, Robbie Prendergast, a garbage man who occasionally robs drug dealers, plays some calming music in his car, telling a friend that the song “takes you away from your reality” and ”puts you in another.”

That seems to be the goal that Brad Ingelsby, the show’s creator — who also wrote 2021’s “Mare of Easttown,” another procedural set in the same region — seems intent on: using his art to put his audience in a different reality. In the case of “Task,” he transports us to a downtrodden stretch of rural America where a guy like Robbie has to resort to stealing from drug dealers in order to make ends meet. While other prestige HBO series like “The White Lotus” promise to whisk viewers to glamorous locales and provide a glimpse of the tribulations of the wealthy, Mr. Ingelsby’s shows inhabit a world that his audience lives in or, if they don’t, are not otherwise inclined to contemplate.

“Task” makes a compelling companion to the worthwhile new show “The Lowdown,” from the writer and director Sterlin Harjo. His two FX series — he also co-created the coming-of-age comedy “Reservation Dogs” about Indigenous kids growing up on a reservation — take place in his native Oklahoma: one in a sleepy town in the Muscogee Nation and the other in the more bustling parts of Tulsa. Mr. Harjo’s stories unfold in the reddest of red states, but they demonstrate that these places are more complicated and diverse than an election night map would suggest. The shows aren’t overtly about political differences, but their very existence feels political.

“The Lowdown” does address politics, class and corruption directly: The show centers on a gubernatorial race and the impact it could have on many communities throughout the state. Ethan Hawke’s hipster reporter (or, as he dubs himself, “truthstorian”), Lee Raybon, is trying to unravel a conspiracy involving a wealthy real estate developer who’s tied to a conservative businessman turned candidate. The show’s authentically eccentric tone is a striking contrast to, say, “Tulsa King,” another show co-created by Mr. Sheridan that’s about a New York mafioso who’s exiled to Oklahoma. Unlike “The Lowdown,” “Tulsa King” is hardly rooted in its location; in fact, after its first season, the show started filming largely in Georgia, despite being set in Oklahoma.

What unites shows like “Task” and “The Lowdown” is an unerring sense of place. Mr. Harjo knows these Oklahoma locales like the back of his hand. Mr. Ingelsby’s tales of heartbreak and redemption could happen only against a backdrop of the gray skies and dilapidated buildings of Delaware County. The similar personal circumstances of Kate Winslet’s cop in “Mare of Easttown” and Mark Ruffalo’s F.B.I. agent in “Task” — both stories involve sons who suffered from mental health issues and who couldn’t be helped before tragedy struck — could happen to people in a thriving community just as easily as in a place where an abandoned quarry qualifies as a hot spot. And Mr. Ingelsby hedges his narrative bets on whether the mutual sadness of the setting and the stories is a result of causation or is merely correlation. But even as these universally recognizable family dramas unfold, it’s undeniable that larger societal forces in the region have worn these places, and their residents, down to a nub.

Mr. Sheridan’s shows, by contrast, often feel like they’re skimming along the surface of the issues about which their characters — and many viewers — feel so strongly. What the Sheridan-verse has to say about the way we live now, and whose view of our past and present is the most trustworthy, has more to do with the needs of soap opera plot mechanics than any kind of consistent and clearly articulated ethos.

A memorable “Yellowstone” episode saw John Dutton, played by Kevin Costner, leading a celebratory day of branding cattle in some of the prettiest country Montana has to offer. At one point, he asked an environmental activist he was trying to seduce what she thought of the event. “I thought parts of it were beautiful and I thought parts of it were absolutely heartbreaking,” she told him. “Yeah, then you and I saw it the same,” he replied, before she clarified, “I’m guessing we agree on the beautiful parts, but our heartbreaks are different.”

“Our heartbreaks are different” might be a fitting elegy for the current division in the country. But the successes of “Task” and “The Lowdown” lie in how they transport their viewers not to a fantasy version of a country that likely never existed, but to somewhere other than their own reality to see the stories of people with whom they might identify.

These shows strive to give an accurate sense of their settings, and the lives, struggles and concerns of the people who live there. They may not be offering escapism, but they provide a chance at empathy.

Alan Sepinwall has been a TV critic for The Star-Ledger and Rolling Stone. He writes the newsletter What’s Alan Watching? and is the author of, among other books, “Saul Goodman v. Jimmy McGill: The Complete Critical Companion to ‘Better Call Saul.’”

Source photographs by Peter Kramer/HBO.

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The post This HBO Miniseries Gets Rural America Right appeared first on New York Times.

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