Thanks to Liam Matthews of the tremendous Dad Shows Substack for putting this team together! If you’re not already following him, you should. Now, throw your body armor on. We got a spot to hit.
For the last quarter of my career with the NYPD, I served on a federal task force. We ran investigations into violent robbery crews. Knocked down doors. Shined flashlights and sidearms into dark bedrooms. And ate greasy food in sketchy bars. Mostly it was the eating, now that I think about it. Nevertheless, because of my professional past, I believe I am the cultural critic best suited to comment on Brad Ingelsby’s Task, his follow up to the spectacular Mare of Easttown. Starring Mark Ruffalo (“They knew! And they let it happen!”) and Tom Pelphrey (the gone-too-soon Outer Range), Task follows a grieving FBI agent investigating a crew ripping off west Pennsylvania stash houses. On the surface, it is the ultimate Dad Show. But look closer and you’ll realize the broken men cruising Chester County are not as compelling as the women forced to deal with them.
Task is, undoubtedly, a Mom Show. It’s about mothers and the childless women forced to care for stunted and violent men. And because of that, it is glorious.
Binging the first four episodes, I realized creator Brad Ingelsby is more interested in the moments between the moments. The Michael Mann-esque felonies that drive the main plot are staged effectively, and without drawing attention to themselves. But Task shines brightest when it’s quiet. As Ingelsby showed in Mare and the underrated Ben Affleck alcoholism/basketball mash-up, The Way Back, and also this year’s Echo Valley, he loves broken people relating to other broken people. You can’t pull that off without empathy, and few writers exhibit as much compassion for their creations. Whether it’s Ruffalo’s grieving FBI Agent Tom Brandis, who makes Rust Cohle almost chill, or Pelphrey’s grieving (you see a pattern?) Robbie Pendergrast, the ex-con/garbage man/home invader, or the show’s breakout star, Alison Oliver’s messy, sloppy (but not grieving?), screw up of a Pennsylvania State Trooper, Elizabeth Stover, Ingelsby & Co. will make you love them. He’s interested in odd faces and working class lives and weird accents and stupid decisions. But most of all, he’s all about relationships. I think Ingelsby wants to write adult family dramas, like This Is Us or thirtysomething (a deep cut, there). Masked-up home invaders are his way into our living rooms.
And I’m on board for the ride. But back to the moms.
Without spoiling much, after a drug heist goes extremely wrong, Robbie brings his work home, putting his own kids in danger and making Maeve, his dead brother’s 21-year-old daughter, in a serious bind. Played by an unrecognizable Emilia Jones (CODA), Maeve’s the first clue that the show we’re watching is actually about the women keeping these men upright. She’s raising Robbie’s kids (their mom split) while trying to date and do, you know, things a 21-year-old wants to do. Which is tough when your uncle hides in your closet and dumps a possible co-conspirator indictment in your lap.
On the flip side, Brandis, played to bearded, schlubby perfection by Ruffalo (no more Collateral undercover badassery for him), is struggling with an arguably worse situation. One he medicates with vodka self-served in Philadelphia Phillies collectible cups. After losing his wife, Brandis is forced back onto the streets by his taker-of-zero-crap boss (Martha Plimpton!!!). In need of a shave and healthier decisions, Brandis is surrounded at home by his adopted teenaged daughter, Emily (Silvia Dionicio), and his biological daughter, Sara (Phoebe Fox). There’s also an adopted son, Ethan, but he’s temporarily out of the picture—and also the source of Brandis’s drinking and enthusiastic schlubbery.
Ingelsby doesn’t stop there. His novelistic approach to TV writing sprawls, while somehow managing to go deep. Task’s cast is huge. But every character pops, and each gets their moment. Robbie’s been stealing from a biker gang that’s selling fentanyl-laced dope to rural fiends. And when Dark Hearts shot caller Perry (Jamie McShane) finds out, he is…displeased. The only thing reining him in is—you guessed it—the exhausted, world-weary Donna (Stephanie Kurtzuba). Eryn, the girlfriend of Perry’s Lieutenant, figures big, too. There’s also Det. Aleah Clinton (Thuso Mbedu), who reveals in an interrogation the psychic scars given to her by, yep, a dude. This admittance is made to a female prisoner who’s landed in cuffs because of, yep, a dude.
All these women, surrounded by men who don’t deserve them, or mistreat them, or beat them, or try to sleep with them. Or refuse to sleep with them. But there’re no Mary Sues in Task’s downtrodden strip of Pennsylvania. In episode three, PSP Stover freezes while clearing a house. She screws up, and her struggling with her mistake makes her the most fascinating character on the show. I worked with four or five female partners in my twenty years. I see pieces of them in Alison Oliver’s sloppy-but-eager new jack Statie. Stover wants to do better. She wants to be better. So does Maeve, doomed by chance and choice to raising her cousins and managing a Chuck-E-Cheese-style arcade. All the women populating Ingelsby’s world want out, or at least to elevate themselves above their stations. I suspect, however, that not all of them will.
Despite all this, Task is, at its heart, a crime show. And this crime’s compelling. The home invasions evolve into a time-sensitive abduction. The stakes, as they say, get raised. Task works as a multi-layered, dual-lead procedural; Brandis and Robbie each navigating their way out, each dealing with turncoats and dead-ends. Each supported—or held back?—by the women in their lives. Women fated to sling cheap whisky in wood-paneled biker bars or serve ice cream to schoolmates or elicit confessions by sharing their histories of domestic abuse. The women wandering the wasteland their men have made, and trying their damndest to get through it unhurt.
I’m a former detective who’s favorite movie is Heat. The bank robbery shootout lives rent-free in my mind. I rewatch the 4K bluray yearly. I kind of hate to admit this, but Task works best for me in its quiet moments of familial struggle. In hissed monologues or emotional pleas. In a boy realizing for the first time he can float, and maybe even swim. All the characters in Ingelsby’s bleak vision of Pennsylvania want to get away from where their choices have led them. They’re all swimming, but that tide, she’s going out fast.
I’m betting some won’t make the shore.