If there’s a type of TV I love, it’s the hard-boiled detective drama: stories about morally complex, oft washed-up cops who battle personal demons while they work the beat, confronted with grim cases that reinforce their cynical outlook on the world. HBO’s Task, the latest series from Brad Ingelsby, the creator of Mare of Easttown, is an absorbing new take on the genre, centering on a string of drug den robberies in blue-collar Pennsylvania with tragic ripple effects.
In the 2010s, these shows were a dime a dozen: True Detective, Hannibal, Mindhunter; Luther and Broadchurch over in the UK. Nowadays, save for the aforementioned Mare, such comparably successful examples of what was once a staple TV genre are harder to come by. (Last year’s True Detective: Night Country is as close as we’ve come.) Task feels like the first one in a while.
When we meet FBI agent Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo), he’s been taken off field duty, instead charged with an unenviable assignment: to promote the Bureau at a high school career fair, a symbol of his fall from grace. We soon learn, however, that this is not down to some sort of moral or professional shortcoming. Instead, he has faced the most terrible of personal tragedies: his wife is dead, murdered by his mentally unwell adoptive son, who now awaits trial in prison. As a former man of the cloth, his faith in God is taken to its breaking point; in his old life as a Catholic priest, he so often called upon forgiveness in others, but now struggles to find it within himself, instead turning to the bottle.
In the meantime, a group of friends who ostensibly work as garbage men—Robbie (Tom Pelphrey), Cliff (Raúl Castillo) and Peaches (Owen Teague)—rob a series of trap houses belonging to biker gang the Dark Hearts, drawing the attention of the feds. Despite his struggles, the experienced Brandis is called upon to set up a task force to investigate the robberies, aided by local detectives Grasso (House of the Dragon’s Fabien Frankel) and Aleah (Thuso Mbedu), plus Lizzie (Alison Oliver), a relatively green state trooper. An interesting wrinkle in Task is that we get to see the investigation from the perspectives of both the cops and the robbers, allowing us to bond and empathize with the latter. Robbie isn’t a bad guy as such; for him, the robberies are driven by a desire to improve his family’s material circumstances, in the hope that he can give them a better life elsewhere.
