Task's premiere brings Mare Of Easttown energy back to HBO

And when he’s pulled out of recruitment and put onto a task force, Tom is given a team who seem fresh out of the academy: hot mess State Trooper Lizzie Strover (Alison Oliver), introverted detective Aleah Clinton (Thuso Mbedu), and smooth-talking local counterintelligence agent Anthony Grasso (Fabien Frankel). At first glance, the quartet look more like a dad taking his family on summer vacation than four highly trained agents investigating a string of robberies. 

For his part, Robbie is also a father. He has a young son named Wyatt (Oliver Eisenson), a preteen daughter named Harper (Kennedy Moyer), and his 21-year-old niece, Maeve (Emilia Jones), who he’s treated as a co-parent since his kids’ mom left a year ago. When it comes time to recruit a third robber, he and Cliff reach out to Peaches (Owen Teague), a newly engaged young man who will do what they say and who eventually ends up dead because of it. And when their robbery goes very, very wrong, it’s a young boy who eventually becomes the pawn in what unexpectedly becomes a kidnapping story. 

The kidnapping angle hasn’t really been a part of the show’s marketing. And that, along with the mystery of what happened with Tom’s family, are the biggest “hooks” to keep us watching. But that’s still a very different model than Mare Of Easttown, where a murder case gave the show a classic whodunnit structure to drive the story forward. If Mare was a murder mystery anchored in a character study, Task is a character study that just happens to feature crime. 

We’ll have to wait and see how well that works week to week, but at least in this premiere, the character work is strong enough to carry the hour. Ruffalo is in fine form here, balancing his sheepish charisma with a touch of something more haunted. If the scene where he stumbles to bed drunk feels a little rote for this genre, his sweet visit to his daughter’s job at Rita’s and his gentle task force management style add some new elements into the gruff crime-drama mix. Even more intriguing is the fact that he spent eight years as a priest before joining the FBI, which is a thread I’m eager to see the show unspool. 

But the real revelation is Pelphrey, who was Emmy nominated for his guest turn on Ozark but who I know best as the rare bright spot in Marvel’s lackluster Iron Fist series. (Ward Meachum forever!) While Tom fits a certain prestige drama detective archetype, Robbie is a trickier character to pin down. In some ways, he’s a sweet, emotionally attentive caretaker to his kids and his niece. We even get a whole sitcom-esque moment where he gets trapped in Maeve’s closet as she starts making out with a date. Yet the violent way he reacts to the date’s provocations, his subsequent fight with Maeve over who actually owns the house, and the way his daughter begs her cousin not to leave them suggests his caretaking has its limits too. 

The juxtaposition of Robbie’s warm, almost carefree demeanor and the terrifying crimes he commits is by far the most compelling element of Task so far. The Halloween masks—particularly the skull one on Robbie—add an almost otherworldly quality to the robbery sequences, which stand in stark contrast to the naturalism the show deploys elsewhere. Even the first robbery in which everything goes right and no one dies is unsettling to watch. The second, in which everything goes wrong and four people die, is one of the tensest TV sequences I’ve seen in a while. (I went back and forth on whether I thought Robbie and Cliff were going to just straight-up murder the kid.) While the first sequence almost makes Robbie & co. seem like trained professionals, the second is a brutal reminder that when guns are involved, all it takes is one thing to go wrong for everything to spiral out of control. 

Early into the episode, Robbie tells a story about how a heart can explode from a shock of cold water so you need to acclimatize your body before jumping in. Only here, he and Cliff acclimatized too far, growing from confident to reckless with the risks they’re willing to take. There are potential plot implications to that—not just in the central cat-and-mouse detective story but in the idea of a biker gang turf war breaking out over these robberies. Yet it’s the character implications that are far more compelling. 

Where Mare Of Easttown was a show about motherhood, repression, and redemption, Task seems interested in fatherhood, faith, and grief. Those are slightly more common themes for the crime-drama genre. But this premiere suggests Ingelsby has a perspective (and a cast) that could make them feel fresh again. 

Stray observations  

• • Welcome to The A.V. Club‘s weekly coverage of Task! I’m excited to spend Sundays breaking down this show with you all and look forward to reading your theories if/when the series goes into mystery mode. 
• • Also, with a Mark and a Tom playing a Tom and a Robbie, I can already tell I’m going to mix up someone’s name at least once in these recaps. So apologies in advance if I do. (At least Mare had the benefit of being a weird, memorable name.)
• • Never in all my years of life have I seen someone dig into an ice cream container with their fingers. What an insane thing to do. 
• • Tom is a bird watcher, and birds/bird feeders serve as repeated imagery throughout this premiere. 
• • Lots of heartbreaking complexity to the moment Tom drops off a suit for his son to wear to his sentencing hearing but doesn’t join for visiting hours.
• • The runner about Robbie trying online dating is such a hilarious non sequitur to everything else going on. 
• • I’m not sure if this counts as a spoiler or not, but when Tom is reading the paperwork on his son’s case, you can pause and read some of it. It says that Ethan “willfully and unlawfully committed manslaughter” after failing to take prescribed medication and hearing voices that told him to kill. It also specifies that he attacked “the spouse and immediate family” of a federal agent and seems to suggest he pushed someone down the stairs, although part of that sentence is illegible.