Is HBO back? Now, I know what you’re saying, HBO has always done well at the Emmys and other award show, then I’ll say yes, that’s true, but I think a great deal of brand bias led some HBO series to be overrated and rewarded over shows that were better. But, let’s not forget, despite all those Emmys, HBO has been in trouble lately. Pop in a CEO who doesn’t really seem to know what he’s doing and appears to be anti-streaming in midst of the streaming zeitgeist (for better or worse, but least the binge model is slowly going away), drop the recognizable HBO branding from HBO Max, leaving it with the confusingly meaningless and generic Max branding. When I hear “max”, I think immediately of TJ Maxx, Max from Stranger Things, Montana Max from Tiny Toons, or the max fill line on a cup of noodles. The idea of it being an HBO streaming service is the last thing on my mind. But now that the HBO is literally back in HBO Max, HBO’s programming is working its way into my good graces once again (although I still haven’t forgiven them for taking Infinity Train off).
As with last week’s The Chair Company, I’m here to talk to you again about a recently wrapped HBO series. This time it’s Task, the follow-up to the lauded Mare of Easttown (which I didn’t care for—it’s hard for me to empathize with a dirty cop who plants drugs on family members and gets people who rely on her killed because of her lack of regard for good judgment and/or procedure). And much like Breaking Bad birthed Better Call Saul, Task steps up in every way and absolutely blew me away from the very first episode. I tore through this series in a way normally reserved for comedies or other light shows that are easy to consume in large quantities. Task is anything but light. It is seven, one hourish episodes of human darkness, deep misfortune, and gritty, irrevocable violence. But it’s also one of the most touching and beautiful shows I’ve had the pleasure of viewing for some time. Let’s get into it.
Task follows FBI agent Tom Brandis, played by the always excellent Mark Ruffalo (Collateral, The Avengers). He’s currently doing the job fair circuit and is out of the field because of a family incident that left one member dead and another in prison. But when his boss Kathleen McGinty, played by Martha Plimpton (Raising Hope, The Goonies) calls him back in to deal with a new crew in the area, he’s assigned to head up a task force of state and local police to deal with a very dangerous situation. Turns out there’s been a trio of Halloween masked home invaders hitting up trap houses of area gangs. One in particular, the biker gang called the Dark Hearts, has been hit the most, and is out for blood as a result. Tom has to bring this crew’s reign of terror to an end to stem the tide of escalating gang violence.
Leading the crew is Robbie Prendergrast, which isn’t a typo, it really has that many Rs in it, played by Tom Pelphrey (Ozark), whom I’d only seen before in Iron Fist. And if you have seen Iron Fist, you’d be in your rights to assume Pelphrey is going to be the weak link in this cast because, well, Iron Fist was pretty dismal, but as far as I can tell, Pelphrey puts in a career performance here. Robbie is an immediately likable character and while he and Tom are not diametrically opposed characters, they play incredible foils to each other, both juggling a different set of problems. Robbie’s brother Billy is missing in the way that means dead, but his body will never be found, so Robbie’s moved his family into Billy’s old house. Ostensibly to take care of his young adult niece Maeve, Billy’s daughter, but more often than not it seems like she’s the one taking care of him and his two kids. Maeve is played by Emilia Jones, and if you don’t know her name yet, you should. She played Kinsey Locke in Locke & Key (the ending of that series wasn’t her fault, I’m sure, but she was great), she starred in the Oscar-winning CODA, and she’s just delivered an incredible performance here in Task. While the main focus of the series remains on Robbie and Tom, Maeve quietly, but not too quietly, is the heart and soul of a show that has heart and soul to spare. I have a feeling there will be Emmy talk over this show and while Ruffalo and Pelphrey especially deserve the buzz, I don’t want Jones to be left out. She delivers a powerhouse performance in a linchpin role to the show. She ties the entire narrative together and goes toe to toe with these seasoned actors and never once looks out of place.
The Dark Hearts are a particularly vicious group, keeping themselves on top of the suburban and rural areas outside of Philadelphia. Yes, just like Mare of Easttown, Task brings you to the area near my fair city and with it, those accents. Now, I don’t hear those DelCo accents too often since I rarely leave the concrete comforts of the city, but the ones in the show were pretty authentic when they showed up. Sure, there are plenty of slip-ups and times when they’re just completely gone, but for the most part it’s convincing enough. Accent work is fascinating to me; often it seems the best actors at doing these very specific American accents are English, Irish, or Australian, as is a large chunk of this cast. In some cases, a DelCo accent will become full on Irish, but it’s forgivable enough and if they had never attempted such a specific local accent, I wouldn’t have given any thought to accents at all. Still, I appreciate the effort at authenticity. There’s a locally comical scene right at the beginning of the show when Tom is talking to his daughter and mentions scrapple, Acme, and water ice in basically one breath. I’m surprised they didn’t find a way to work in cheesesteaks, hoagies, and free Dunkin after an Eagles win. We are definitely in the Philly area, even if we aren’t in a Wawa. But I digress. The Dark Hearts self-police, so to speak, by killing problem members. It’s an extreme solution, but local chapter leader Jayson Wilkes, played by Sam Keeley (The Siege of Jadotville), isn’t too worried about his position. Not until Robbie, Cliff, and Peaches (best nickname) stumble upon a trap house with way too much product and something else that wasn’t supposed to be there and they take it all. And leave some bodies behind in the process. What follows is a race against time—Robbie put a ticking clock on his whole family, his crew, and even Jayson. And through all this, Tom has to put an end to it, with the assistance of a team cobbled together from the people their departments were happy to give up. Talk about an uphill battle.
As the walls start to close in on Robbie brick by brick, the stakes ramp up; people start dying and more and more the show feels like it’s barreling to a Shakespearean tragedy. Of course I won’t spoil any details for you, but as I’ve said before, sticking the landing is as important or even more important than the rest of the show. A bad ending can color your view of the entire journey you took to get there, right, Game of Thrones? Luckily, Task has one of the most emotionally satisfying payoffs of a series in recent memory. There are Episode 1 details I haven’t even mentioned so far because, again, you deserve to be as engrossed in this show as I was. You deserve to feel every twist and turn and the weight of every decision and the catharsis of a well earned and well written ending. But what I do want to talk about, however, are some of the things that elevate this from basic cop show into top tier crime drama and what I think is the spiritual successor to the first season of True Detective, which might be the best single season of television I’ve ever seen. Task doesn’t quite reach that, but it hits heights I never expected. It starts tense and builds more as it goes on, coming to a frenzied conclusion that left me on the edge of my seat for entire episodes. It is, and I hate to say this again, masterfully crafted. The pacing, which can seem a little baffling at first, ends up being perfect by the end. There’s nothing here that doesn’t work.
One of the most interesting things about this show is that despite the relatively bleak subject matter, it approaches so many situations with warmth and compassion. The Philadelphia area doesn’t get a lot of big shows set here and when we do, it’s often, well, not exactly a hoot. The aforementioned Mare of Easttown, the really good Long Bright River (which I need to rewatch and then share with you), and even, in some ways, It’s Always Sunny are all kind of bleak shows with the rare flash of hope shining through. Task, however, approaches everything with a measured hand. The characters are thoughtful, deliberate, sometimes to the point of inaction, but they seem to really consider things in a real way as they are presented with different challenges. And it makes the moments that they act on impulse or let their emotions get the better all the more impactful and genuine. The characters have such depth to them and even the smallest of minor characters is written with complexity and care to feel like a real person. No one is just a stock character. There’s the strong one, there’s the dumb one, there’s the smart one, etc. Not in Task. They’ve got their moments, their character arcs, their troubles as well. This is a deeply character driven show, despite having a full and rewarding plot, and those characters are what makes this show so special. A good crime plot can easily turn into just another cop show. But Tom’s manner, due to the tragedy that occurred in his family, is so different from what you’d expect. He’s a tad bit downtrodden, he’s out of shape, he drinks himself to sleep and shocks himself awake with ice water every morning, but it has him considering things carefully and intelligently (for the most part). And a good antagonist makes your show even better. And this show has a great antagonist in Jayson and the Dark Hearts.
Not Robbie. No, I can’t quite call him that. He’s not a villain, no, despite the fact he would do some villainous things. What I thought was going to be a cat-and-mouse game between Tom and Robbie turned out to be a story of dual and dueling protagonists. Thanks in part to the strength of Pelphrey’s immense performance, almost immediately you start to root for Robbie. And you don’t want to see the two of them pitted against each other, even though their paths are destined to cross and blood is destined to stain the soil on which they stand, but you can’t help but want them both to win. It sets you up for the best worst feeling of incredible tension as the show crescendoes to the end. It sucks to know going into a confrontation between two characters you have come to love that the only narratively satisfying ending isn’t the two of them becoming best friends and opening a B&B together where they solve mysteries in their small town in between perfecting the ideal breakfast buffet. I cannot really overstate Pelphrey’s performance here, I really don’t think I can even do it justice. And Emilia Jones; her performance as Maeve, a 20 year old adult suddenly orphaned and thrust into the role of adoptive mother to her niece and nephew while Robbie lives in what is her house is unbelievable. Maeve delivers a lot of the emotional punch in this show, which is saying something because so many of the characters are vying for the heartstrings as well.
Family is a big part of the show, including adoption. Tom and his wife were foster parents who adopted two children and now his family has been torn apart, leaving them grasping desperately at the tattered fabric that once kept them together. Maeve, on the other hand, didn’t have a choice in becoming an adoptive parent, and she doesn’t really have the tools to deal with that. She, like Tom, is grieving, and unlike like Tom, has decades less life experience to help deal with it. But she’s stuck with it and struggles with her duty, another big theme in the show. Faith and duty play important roles in Task, with Tom being a former priest who then went into the FBI, Maeve’s duty to the family she didn’t want, and Robbie’s duty to Maeve and his own kids. Task wants you to sit and think about our duty to ourselves and to each other. And the writing here really pushes that. Faith is important, but not faith in a system or a god or a religion or badge. It’s faith in something else, something even more amorphous and disappointing than religion—faith in yourself and the people around you. And let’s not forget the big F, the hardest F word to say, forgiveness.
So many of these characters are grieving at the start of the show. Tom and his family are in mourning, Robbie misses his brother, Maeve misses her father. And there’s no coming back for them; the people they miss are graveyard dead and there is no resolution to that. The show asks us to question where to draw the line of forgiveness and measure the consequences of where you draw it. Tom’s old job was to forgive. Robbie was never a man of faith and forgiveness is a much harder pill to swallow for him. And what’s even harder than forgiving the people who wronged us (if they deserve it, I’m not one of those forgive and forget types myself) is forgiving ourselves. There is no grief that exists without the regret of what could have been different. Forgiving yourself for not having done things differently is really, really hard. Linear time is the cruelest mechanic of our reality. Task explores this really deeply and very well. I know I’ve said before that I have a hard time connecting with shows where cops are the protagonists, but I think one of the things that makes Task compelling is that it doesn’t feel like a cop show. Yeah, he’s a fed, but you know what I mean. It feels like a fully realized action crime drama that just happens to have the FBI and drug dealing biker gangs in it.
With Task, HBO is officially on a roll. The strength of this show makes it the best crime TV HBO has done since True Detective season one (season three was pretty good, but two and four…). The Chair Company is a low or high stakes absurdist suburban conspiracy show that I can’t stop talking about. Peacemaker had a second season that completely turned me around on the series and made me a believer in the Gunnmosphere. Creature Commandos, the animated spin-off of Peacemaker, is excellent as well. Beyond just HBO, so many cable networks and streamers are bringing excellent shows out with serious star power and I’m all for it; bring on the next golden age of television. And this show is a worthy installment in that next golden age. Task is a deeply rewarding, richly told narrative with some of the best character work you’re likely to see and that makes it a must watch. The entire series (or perhaps first season, should it continue anthology-style like True Detective) is available to stream on HBO Max.
