Gritty, realistic, down-to-earth: If you read much about Task, the new crime drama from Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby, those are the kinds of adjectives you can expect to see. You won’t see them used about the show’s music, though, that’s for sure. Composed by Baltimore electronic musician Dan Deacon, Task’s score soars, it sizzles, it screeches, it screams. It’s an insanely overheated sonic signature for the show, making anything from fixing a morning coffee to brushing dead leaves off a porch sound like Oppenheimer waiting for the bomb to go off.
I love that for Task, personally. And I love how much director Jeremiah Zagar echoes that energy in his shot compositions — men framed in colorful doorways, masked monsters pass in slow silence across every axis of the frame. There’s a charge to how this thing looks and sounds that I couldn’t find in Mare outside of Kate Winslet’s lead performance. It feels like a big leap forward.
Set in 2024 — a distant age, when the FBI’s nominal task was stopping actual criminals instead of racially profiling delivery drivers on behalf of a fascist pedophile —Task stars Mark Ruffalo as Agent Tom Brandis. But Tom isn’t doing much agenting when the series begins. His current assignment is thanklessly manning the Bureau’s booth at job fairs; he treats this as a break from his real passions: birdwatching, the Phillies, and getting blind drunk off cheap liquor by the handle. You can see why his daughter, Emily (Silvia Dionicio), responds so half-heartedly to his attempts at fatherly gestures: It’s not like he can hide his alcoholism in a big Phillies commemorative cup and act like nothing’s wrong.
Tom reveals at one of those job fairs that he was both a philosophy major and an ex-priest (!) before becoming an FBI agent and family man, so maybe he’s just the depressive type, but there’s much more to it than that. We find out in bits and pieces that his wife has been murdered, that his son did it, and that a third sibling, a sister present in a family photo seen by a visiting friend from the priesthood, is unaccounted for. (My guess was that she was murdered by the son too, but I don’t want to say so until I hear it confirmed on the screen, since she could just be away at college for all we know.)
When we first encounter Tom, his morning routine is crosscut with that of Robbie, whom we first see tucking his son into bed. Played by Tom Pelphrey, whose one-season stint on Ozark is (give or take a Julia Garner) the indisputable highlight of that show, Robbie’s got a bushy beard, a ponytail, a bunch of tattoos, soulful brown eyes, a soft-spoken demeanor…and a job in waste management that he uses to scope out and burglarize trap houses in daring nighttime smash-and-grab raids.
Robbie’s crew’s success is such that the drug-dealing biker gang they keep hitting has begun murdering members of rival gangs they suspect are responsible. This in turn forces Kathleen McGinty (Martha Plimpton), the beleaguered, soon-to-be-forcibly-retired local FBI chief, to form a task force of Bureau and local law enforcement to find the robbers before a gang war accidentally breaks out. Tom is pulled out of the career-fair gig to head up the group, which — much like the task force in The Wire Season 1 — is the kind of thing the brass likes to announce they’re doing to make it look like something’s being done, then staff and fund as half-assedly as possible.
In Tom’s case, this means assigning him a repo’d house he has to rehab from decrepitude to use as an office, and three very green officers as his local liaisons: county cop Aleha Clinton (Thuso Mbedu), who wipes down the laptop he issues her before using it; state trooper Lizzie Stover (Alison Oliver), who’s underprepared and loudly breaking up with her boyfriend on the phone but (wouldn’t you know it!) really good at a crime scene; and local detective Anthony Grasso (Fabien Frankel, aurally unrecognizable from his role as Ser Criston Cole on House of the Dragon), the most cop-show cop of the quartet.
As for Robbie, he’s got a lot going on, even aside from sticking up motorcycle clubs with his buddies Cliff (Raúl Castillo) and Peaches (Owen Teague) while wearing badass Halloween masks. He’s an ex-con, which limits his dating options, though unlike his “monk” of a best friend Cliff, he’s still trying his best. His girlfriend left him and their two kids, Harper (Kennedy Moyer) and Wyatt (Oliver Eisenson). He was close with his brother, Billy, but he’s dead, seemingly killed due to criminal goings-on.
But when Tom lost his house, he and his children were taken in by his 20-year-old niece Maeve (Emilia Jones). She does her level best at housekeeping and parenting with minimal gratitude from anyone but Harper, who looks up to her as glamorously adult, but she herself doesn’t feel that way. When a suitor who winds up getting scared off by Robbie asks her if she’s an artist, she replies with glum fatalism, “I’m nothing.” Her argument about the dead-end life Robbie’s forced her into is one of the episode’s high points.
The other is the big robbery that serves as its climactic set-piece. Acting on a tip he gets texted from an unknown source, presumably one within the gang, Robbie and his two pals strap on the skull, devil, and werewolf masks and hit a big safehouse in the sticks. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong: Peaches gets briefly unmasked and loses his gun, the couple on the scene refuse to cooperate since they can tell there’s a problem with the robbery, another member of the gang shows up unexpectedly.
By the time the suspenseful, bloody, artfully shot sequence is over, four people, including Peaches, are dead — and Robbie and Cliff have been forced to kidnap the slain couple’s son rather than allow him to discover his parents’ bodies. The kidnapping is no doubt what will kick off the task force’s quest for real.
Much as this review itself has done, attention for this show is likely to focus on the twin lead performances of Ruffalo and Pelphrey and the oomph of the imagery and score. In fact, I’m gonna double back on the imagery: There’s a zoom out of Robbie and his crew lounging on the rocks of a quarry lake that knocked me back on my heels, and a sequence of cuts — from a bug zapper to a cigarette to a bearded man’s face hidden by a screen door to a woman sitting alone on a porch at night — that’s one of the most thoughtful David Lynch homages I’ve ever seen.
But don’t let’s overlook the way the supporting cast supports these four pillars. This sounds like a cliché, but it’s true: I would watch a show about Martha Plimpton’s harried FBI middle manager, or Emilia Jones’s gimlet-eyed observer of her own misfortune Maeve, or Owen Teague’s doomed grand romantic Peach Boy. Ingelsby’s work can be predictable if you know how crime-drama story beats work, but skillful actors make his creations come alive, as Winslet and Julianne Nicholson proved on Mare. Task has already started stronger than Mare, and Mare ended with its strongest episode. That’s a pattern I’d be happy to watch Task follow.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.