Task

In 2021, Brad Inglesby created HBO's amazingly successful Mare of Easttown. Not a sequel exactly, Inglesby's latest HBO hit, Task (the first two of seven Sunday-night episodes of which have already aired), is set in a similar Delaware County "working class" environment of natural beauty, old-fashioned homes, which house struggling, often dysfunctional families with limited opportunities, little hope, and lots of personal and familial grief. Indeed, Inglesby seems to traffic primarily in unrelenting bleakness and grief, and does it well, pulling his audience into a real empathy with his complex characters and their very unfair world.

Task  stars Mark Ruffalo as an FBI agent, Tom Brandis, who heads a four-person task force to investigate a series of crimes committed by two (sometimes three) masked men robbing drug "trap" houses. Brandis is an ex-priest, whose family life has been shattered by a recent tragedy, the murder of his wife by his mentally ill adopted son, Ethan, and the ongoing toll this has taken on him and his daughters. In Mare, the title character was still grieving the suicide of her son, fighting for custody of her grandson, and generally trying to navigate the complexities of her family situation, while also doing her detective job. The two series are set in the same gritty, depressing, small-town world, although I think Mare and her world seemed overall to be doing a better job of holding their lives together in what was still a genuine local community, however wounded. The absence of any comparable community in Task only adds to the show's intended bleakness. (Mare herself was something of a local hero because of her role on a championship basketball game decades earlier. Tom, although presumably he was not always so self-isolated, seems to have nothing like that in terms of a comparable degree of rootedness in the local community.)

Unlike Mare, where the criminals don't get unmasked until we have gotten to like most of them, Task's principal criminals are identified early (although there may yet be more, for example, a possible informer within the law enforcement community). Brandis' principal criminal opposite is Robbie Prendergast (Tom Pelphrey), a garbage worker, who together with his partner Cliff Broward (Raul Castillo) has been robbing the "trap" houses, operated by a drug-dealing motorcycle gang, "The Dark Hearts." To do this, Robbie and Cliff have had help from some inside informant, "MZ." 

Meanwhile, like Tom, Robbie too is a single father (his partner having abandoned him a year earlier). So Robbie and his two children live with his 21-year old niece Maeve (Emilila Jones), whose father Billy had been involved in the motorcycle gang and was murdered by the group's current leader. Robbie is presented as a somewhat kind-hearted, not very bright guy, living very much in the moment and not planning particularly well for the consequences of his actions. Hence, when one of their robberies goes very badly at the end of the first episode, leaving three gang members and the robbers' third partner dead, Robbie kidnaps the child of those he has just murdered and bings him home, which now obviously further endangers everyone in his household in addition to himself and Cliff.

Meanwhile, the Brandis household is in turmoil over Tom's daughter Emily's inclination to speak at Ethan's imminent sentencing. Tom's daughters are at odds, and he himself is internally torn, missing his wife but also missing his son. Although ostensibly having abandoned religion and regularly now drinking too much, he clearly is still struggling spiritually. At one point, he says to his family, "It's easy to talk about forgiveness when it's not your loss." Such statements and the visit from one of his priest friends in the first episode suggest that faith issues will not be ignored in this series, much as such struggles were also portrayed in Mare (explicitly highlighted there through the characters of the priest and the deacon). It is noteworthy that Brad Inglesby himself speaks of having had relatives who were priests, one of whom left the priesthood.