HBO’s Task is one of those shows that vanishes from memory the moment one stops streaming it. Even the name is forgettable, as I found to my dismay when trying to discuss it with friends. Tarp? Trap? Take? Oh, why bother? It’s the one with the guy from Zodiac and the Avengers films. Max something. Don’t even pretend like you don’t know who I mean.
Mark Ruffalo (yes, him!) plays Tom Brandis, an FBI agent on desk duty after a family tragedy. A sad sack and an alcoholic, Tom is television’s latest illustration of the theory that the police are no better than the criminals they chase. Observe as the poor fellow mans a career fair table in an early scene. So mired in diffidence is our hero that he can barely pretend to sell the bureau to a potential applicant who wanders by.
Things are no better at home, where Tom lives with his adopted daughter, Emily (Silvia Dionicio), in a house full of painful memories. Some months ago, Emily’s biological brother, Ethan (Andrew Russel), inadvertently killed Tom’s wife during a psychotic break. Now, a sentencing hearing looms, and father and daughter must decide whether and how to speak up for the young man in court.
Tom’s return to the field occurs when a spate of home invasions begins plaguing Delaware County, Pennsylvania, the same blue-collar environs where creator Brad Ingelsby’s 2021 HBO drama, Mare of Easttown, was set. Led by sanitation worker Robbie Prendergrast (Tom Pelphrey), a team of miscreants has been robbing drug dealers using intelligence obtained on Robbie’s route. That habit, heretofore consequence-free, blows up in the hoodlums’ faces when, at the end of the pilot episode, a botched heist leaves two victims and an assailant dead. Making matters worse, the trap house is home to a now-orphaned child (a well-directed Ben Doherty). Unsure what else to do, Robbie grabs him on his way out the door.
Much has been made of Task’s gritty verisimilitude, with critics praising its stars’ willingness to master the vowel-flattening “Delco” accent in particular. Less remarked upon has been the nihilistic void at the series’s heart. Well played by former daytime actor Pelphrey, Robbie is everything Tom is not: charismatic, decisive, and vibrantly alive. The trouble is that, like his law-enforcement counterpart, Robbie is utterly and irremediably joyless. Indeed, Task’s charmlessness is the program’s major flaw. No one smiles. No one comes close to a laugh. And no one even tries to lift the poisonous mood that has descended on the Delaware Valley like a fog.
In part, this emotional monotony is due to TV writers’ prejudices toward flyover country. Convinced that no happy families exist between Staten Island and San Bernardino County, television dramatists have long erred on the side of unremitting bleakness. Mare of Easttown, for instance, practically wallowed in its characters’ despair, chronicling not only murder (of course) but suicide, heroin addiction, alcoholism, and assault. True Detective announced, in season after season, that domestic tranquility is a mirage, as, in recent years, did Sharp Objects (2018), Presumed Innocent (2024), and too many other crime-of-the-moment melodramas to count. It is little surprise, given Task’s pedigree, that Tom can’t comfort his daughter, that Robbie bickers endlessly with his adult niece (Emilia Jones), or that the young Doherty’s character has grown up in squalor. What is surprising is the seemingly total absence of wit, whimsy, or even wry amusement from which Task suffers. Have Ingelsby and company never met a real, live human being in all his or her complexity?
Compounding the show’s problems is the fact that it possesses none of the inherent tautness of a whodunnit. How could it? Robbie is explicitly the man for whom Tom’s task force is looking, and the question of motive is largely answered by the end of episode two. Consequently, if the show is going to make its bones, it must do so as a character study. Make the leads fascinating enough, and perhaps we’ll look the other way on the series’s stultifying tone.
On paper at least, this ought to have worked. Tom, a former priest turned dispirited federal agent, has a backstory almost guaranteed to create narrative tension. Robbie, a caring if reckless father, is similarly layered on the page. Yet character, as any writer ought to know, is a function of what on-screen personages do, not what we’re told about them during exposition. Through the three episodes currently available to stream, Tom fails to take a single interesting or unexpected action. Robbie, meanwhile, is pure fight-and-flight, darting boldly through traps of his own making but revealing little beyond an animal will to survive.
MAGAZINE: WOE TO THE CONQUEROR
Of course, the juxtaposition of cop and criminal does deliver sociological insights. It’s just that they are the same ones a dozen other shows have already produced, very often more compellingly. Bad guys have feelings, too. Even police officers have their dark side. Throw in the occasional smarty-pants compositional irony — a shot of Robbie in a death’s-head mask giving way to a shot of Tom’s bird feeder — and one is left with a program that is far less clever than its creators believe. Misery exists right alongside suburban complacency? Who woulda thunk it?
Task is not a bad show on the level of the scene. Every actor present does competent work, and the occasional action sequences are coherently arranged and shot. Nevertheless, the series represents much that is wrong with prestige television in 2025. Dreary, overlong, and lazily “star”-driven, it floats from week to week on a putrid tide of its own self-seriousness. Will Tom catch his man? Will Robbie find a way to return the child he stole? Reader, I will never know. This Task isn’t worth doing.
Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.
