Task

The Garbage Man and the Priest

At this point I can spot the bones of an HBO crime drama almost on sight. There's usually a wounded investigator, a working-class town under permanent gray skies, and some local catastrophe everybody uses as a mirror for the pain they refuse to say out loud. Brad Ingelsby got very close to perfecting that design with *Mare of Easttown*. So when *Task* starts its deliberate trudge through the Philadelphia suburbs of Delaware County, I was ready for another familiar march through misery. It takes a few episodes, but the show eventually stops pretending it's a whodunit and settles into something more interesting: a cramped, exhausted cousin to Michael Mann's *Heat*.

Instead of glossy LA professionals, we get a sanitation worker and a weary ex-priest. Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo), now an FBI agent, had been quietly shunted off to recruitment fairs until a rash of stash-house robberies forces his frosty superior (Martha Plimpton) to hand him a makeshift task force. Across from him is Robbie Prendergrast (Tom Pelphrey), a garbage man robbing drug houses because his family life is splintering and he needs money fast.



Ruffalo is the thing that makes the series breathe. He doesn't play Tom like a television cop with clipped authority and a hidden soft side. He plays him like a man slogging through water. Grieving a dead wife and carrying the shame of a son in jail, Tom moves with his shoulders pitched forward, as if the weight is physically hanging off him. He slurs a little. He looks away. In one small scene, he tries to bluff his way through an obstacle by pretending to be an older man dealing with bladder trouble. Ruffalo makes the lie feel embarrassing enough that it barely registers as a performance. Brian Tallerico, writing for RogerEbert.com, called this Ruffalo's "subtlest and best work in years," and I don't think that's overselling it.

Pelphrey brings the volatility. Anyone who remembers what he did on *Ozark* knows how good he is at making self-destruction feel tender. Robbie is robbing terrible people and telling himself that makes it clean, or at least cleaner. The show isn't really interested in whether he gets caught. It cares more about the sad process by which a decent-enough man talks himself into a corner violence can't actually solve.



When Tom and Robbie finally get locked into an extended scene together, *Task* strips away almost everything else around them. They spend nearly an entire episode trapped in a moving car, and the show turns the cabin into its own pressure chamber. There's the low tire hum, the yellow flicker of streetlights, and a conversation that never openly says what both men understand. Ingelsby writes it less like questioning than like two fighters circling. Pelphrey barely tightens his hands on the steering wheel before answering, but that tiny delay tells you exactly how scared he is. It's the best stretch in the series because it trusts silence.

The show also knows enough to keep glancing at the people who'll pay the price for all this male damage. Emilia Jones is very good as Robbie's 21-year-old niece Maeve, who ends up carrying the fallout while the men make grand, bad decisions. Jones gives her a rigid, defensive exhaustion, as if she's always bracing for whatever fresh disaster is about to walk through the door. The camera often catches her after the men have exited a scene, letting the panic settle on her face. She's the one who understands who gets left behind.



No, it isn't perfect. The first couple of hours can drag, and some of the secondary twists feel less organic than dutiful, like the script is padding the runway. Thuso Mbedu and Fabien Frankel do solid work as younger members of Tom's team, but the show doesn't always know what to do with them beyond reflecting Ruffalo's despair back at him.

Still, it has stayed with me. *Task* is not reinventing the crime series. What it does is take familiar parts and play them with an unusual amount of patience and grown-up sadness. By the end, you aren't really rooting for righteousness. You're just hoping these people can endure one more cold season without breaking completely.