TV’s Best New Show Is A Gripping Crime Drama From The Creator Of ‘Mare Of Easttown’

Home invasions, vicious biker gangs and a rag-tag task force looking for a group of thieves after a young child goes missing. HBO’s best new series has all the elements of a masterpiece crime drama in the making. This should come as no surprise when you see who’s behind the new limited series.

One of the best crime dramas I’ve seen in recent years was HBO’s 2021 miniseries, Mare Of Easttown. The story centered on Mare Sheehan, a world-weary detective sergeant in the fictional suburb of Easttown, Pennsylvania investigating the murder of a young mother. Mare struggles with family issues and a town that questions her ability as a detective, after a year-long investigation into the disappearance of another girl continues to go unsolved.

It’s a great show. The only complaint I have, in retrospect, is how similar it is to the BBC’s Happy Valley, which is an even better show and shares a plethora of similarities. It is Happy Valley transported to Pennsylvania, though the UK version is a little more reminiscent of Fargo, which released the same year (2014). Still, when I heard that Mare Of Easttown creator, Brad Inglesby, had a new show out on HBO I was excited to check it out. Light spoilers ahead.

Task returns to the dense forests and rundown towns of Inglesby’s home state of Pennsylvania. Like his previous series, Task is a character drama about people whose lives have been torn apart by loss and tragedy.

Mark Ruffalo plays FBI agent, Tom Brandis, a former priest who’s taken time away from field duty after a personal tragedy threatens to tear his family apart. After the death of his wife, Brandis has taken to hitting the bottle most nights, putting his teenage daughter, Emily (Silvia Dionicio) in something of a caretaker role. Things get even more complicated when Brandis’s older daughter, Sara (Phoebe Fox) shows up.

Tom Pelphrey (who we’ve seen recently in Prime Video’s Outer Range and HBO’s Love and Death) plays Robbie Prendergast, a garbage collector and father of two young children, who moonlights as an armed robber, knocking down stash houses with his friends. He lives with his niece, Maeve (Emilia Jones) whose father – Robbie’s brother – was killed. She has become, effectively, the caretaker of his children. The details of her father’s death are murky, but appear to be tied to Robbie’s criminal activities.

The stash houses that Robbie and his friend Cliff (Raul Castillo) are hitting happen to all belong to one biker gang, the Dark Hearts. Concerned over a potential gang war brewing, FBI chief Kathleen McGinty (Martha Plimpton) pulls Brandis off of his leave and puts him in charge of a task force, along with several local law enforcement agents: Lizzie Stover (Alison Oliver), Anthony Grasso (Fabien Frankel in a much more likable role than his House Of The Dragon character) and Aleah Clinton (Thuso Mbedu). They operate out of a rundown house in the middle of nowhere.

Things go very badly in the first episode, when a home invasion gone wrong puts Robbie in an impossible situation. I won’t spoil the details. Suffice to say, it’s a compelling inciting incident and I have no idea how it’s going to play out. The FBI task force and the Dark Hearts biker gang are in a race to see who can find the thieves first.

So far, everything about this show is fantastic but Pelphrey’s performance is easily the best part. Robbie is a complicated man, at once incredibly compassionate and deeply self-centered, philosophical and brooding but also impulsive and hot-tempered. It quickly becomes clear that his motives in all of this run much deeper than mere greed. It’s honestly hard not to root for him, even as you realize the terrible danger he’s brought to his family’s doorstep.

Ruffalo’s Brandis is just as sympathetic, a man clearly broken by the loss of his wife and the implications this has for his family, but who still manages to drag himself to work each day, who clearly cares deeply about his family even as he drowns his sorrows.

All of this is gorgeously filmed. The rural forests of Pennsylvania are oozing with atmosphere, captured beautifully by cinematographer Alex Disenhof. The score from composer Dan Deacon is haunting and intense. Inglesby has teamed up with David Obzud (a police advisor and the real world police chief of Easttown, PA) and directors Jeremiah Zagar (Hustle) and Salli Elise Richardson-Whitfield (Altered Carbon) for many of the episodes. The series was filmed in Delaware County, Pennsylvania and Philadelphia.

Two episodes of Task are currently available on HBO Max, with five more airing weekly on Sunday nights. It’s easily the best thing on TV at the moment.

Fun trivia: Michael Keaton was originally cast as Agent Brandis but had to withdraw due to scheduling conflicts.

Here’s the trailer:

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