{"id":184583,"date":"2025-08-29T12:44:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T12:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/184583\/"},"modified":"2025-08-29T12:44:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T12:44:09","slug":"mark-ruffalo-stars-in-relentlessly-glum-hbo-crime-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/184583\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Ruffalo Stars in Relentlessly Glum HBO Crime Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tQuestions of forgiveness hang over much of Task, the new HBO crime drama from Mare of Easttown<\/a> creator Brad Ingelsby<\/a>: its possibility, its purpose, its outermost limits. It\u2019s no wonder, considering how many of its characters endure or perpetuate the sort of suffering that can make mercy seem impossibly out of reach.<\/p>\n

\n\tSpouses, in this gritty Philadelphia suburb, are mostly faithless, absent or dead. Parents, even the well-meaning ones, tend to be neglectful, or also dead. Friends can lie, colleagues can backstab, anyone can die in any number of brutal ways. Innocent children, trusting and helpless, absorb the consequences.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tTask\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tA bummer, in more ways than one.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAirdate:<\/strong> 9 p.m. Sunday, Sep. 7 (HBO)
Cast:<\/strong> Mark Ruffalo, Tom Pelphrey, Emilia Jones, Jamie McShane, Sam Keeley, Thuso Mbedu, Fabien Frankel, Alison Oliver, Ra\u00fal Castillo, Silvia Dionicio, Phoebe Fox, Martha Plimpton
Creator:<\/strong> Brad Ingelsby\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tIf the pain is clear to see, however, the point of watching it all is less obvious. Task is well crafted in many regards, with a top-notch cast<\/a>, painstakingly worn-in sets (Keith Cunningham serves as production designer) and handsome nature-oriented cinematography (courtesy of Alex Disenhof and Elie Smolkin). But its unrelenting misery has a way of flattening rather than deepening the characters at its heart, until the story feels like less than the sum of its parts.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat both of its leading men have suffered some great heartache is obvious from the first minutes of the premiere, directed by Jeremiah Zagar and set to Dan Deacon\u2019s weepy score \u2014 even if the precise shape and scope of their losses will take some time to tease out.<\/p>\n

\n\tTom (Mark Ruffalo<\/a>) is a priest turned FBI agent who starts his mornings in prayer, his face sagged with soul-deep exhaustion. He spends his days manning booths at the career fair and ends his evenings in a vodka-soaked stupor, to the worry of his sweet teenage daughter Emily (Silvia Dionicio).<\/p>\n

\n\tIn another part of town, Robbie (Tom Pelphrey<\/a>), a garbage truck operator, kisses his two adorable elementary-school-aged kids goodbye and drives to work listening to dating app ads. He\u2019s lonely, he confides to his best friend and coworker (Ra\u00fal Castillo\u2019s Cliff), and haunted by dreams of a better life.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut if things look bad now, only more trouble lies ahead. Robbie and Cliff spend their nights robbing drug houses, until a botched job leaves several dead bodies in its wake. The incident prompts the local FBI chief (Martha Plimpton) to assign Tom to a task force investigating the burglaries, over his protests that he\u2019s not ready to return to the field. Worse, the crisis has also attracted the attention of a local biker gang known as the Dark Hearts, led by the volatile Jayson (Sam Keeley) and his stern mentor, Perry (Jamie McShane).<\/p>\n

\n\tTask is not a mystery for Tom and his team, consisting of slick county detective Anthony (Fabien Frankel), no-nonsense city cop Aleah (Thuso Mbedu) and chaotic state trooper Lizzie (Alison Oliver). Nor is it much of a thriller. Although there are occasional car chases and shootouts and eventually an upsettingly high body count, its cops are not particularly competent (Lizzie, in fact, is notably incompetent, prone to freezing up at inopportune times), and its criminals not especially clever. Their clashes are purposefully hectic and confused, the better for questioning rather than glorifying acts of violence.<\/p>\n

\n\tNo, Task is most interested in serving up a drama about people in pain making their way through a world filled with senseless cruelty and overseen (depending on your religious beliefs) by an indifferent God. But where Mare of Easttown rooted its gloom in a vividly realized community, and occasionally counterbalanced it with bits of warmth or levity, Task is too insular to speak to much of anything beyond how much its characters are hurting. <\/p>\n

\n\tOccasionally, that feels like enough. In one of the series\u2019 best scenes, Robbie and Tom come face to face under predictably awful circumstances. But their initial animosity grows more complicated as the two men, both single fathers grappling with grief, guilt and rage, start to see each other as something more than cat or mouse. Pelphrey\u2019s high-strung energy and Ruffalo\u2019s sad-sack vibe bounce interestingly off each other, and I found myself wishing the plot had afforded them more opportunities to play together.<\/p>\n

\n\tMore often, though, the series simply mistakes tragic backstory for meaningful character development. Some supporting players, like Mbedu and Elvis Nolasco (playing drug kingpin Freddy), get almost nothing to do beyond a single splashy monologue about their past traumas. Others, like Frankel and Dionicio and Emilia Jones<\/a> (as Robbie\u2019s hard-bitten, put-upon niece), make out slightly better, but remain stuck in half-assed arcs that exist primarily to serve the Robbie and Tom storylines.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s easy to see why an actor might jump at the chance to appear on a series like this one, filled with the sort of tricky accents and meaty speeches that look great on awards reels, and the cast makes the most of what they\u2019re given. But even their impressive efforts can\u2019t turn such underwritten parts into three-dimensional people.<\/p>\n

\n\tMeanwhile, for all the time lavished upon Tom\u2019s grief or Robbie\u2019s, far less attention is directed toward some of the other characters in their periphery, who\u2019ve struggled just as much if not more. If Ethan (Andrew Russel), Tom\u2019s troubled adult son, has much to say for himself, we barely get to hear it; he\u2019s simply here as a living manifestation of Tom\u2019s greatest devastation. If Robbie\u2019s young kids feel any kind of way about the untenable mess playing out before them, they\u2019re never given the space to show it; the children on this show are either heartstring-tugging witnesses or oblivious MacGuffins.<\/p>\n

\n\tThose who perish over the seven-hour season are likewise relegated to symbols, mourned for only as long as it\u2019s necessary to move the narrative along, and then swiftly forgotten. \u201cIt\u2019s easy to talk about forgiveness when it\u2019s not your loss,\u201d a character notes at one point. But some losses, apparently, matter more than others \u2014 are more palatable or interesting than others.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat Task has no answers for the biggest existential questions it raises, about the purpose of suffering or what we\u2019re meant to do with it, is no big sin. That makes it admirably ambitious and touchingly human. That the show gets so lost in the misery that it seems to forget why it went looking for it in the first place is the letdown.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Questions of forgiveness hang over much of Task, the new HBO crime drama from Mare of Easttown creator…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":184584,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[103721,103722,171,103723,71090,103724,173,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-184583","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-brad-ingelsby","9":"tag-emilia-jones","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-mare-of-easttown","12":"tag-mark-ruffalo","13":"tag-tom-pelphrey","14":"tag-tv","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115112120426750712","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184583\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}