Kate Winslet’s detective from Brad Ingelsby’s Mare of Easttown isn’t the only troubled law enforcement officer who pronounces “water” the Philly way and is reeling from a personal tragedy involving a son with developmental disabilities. Meet Tom Brandis, the paunchy F.B.I. agent played by Mark Ruffalo in Ingelsby’s Task, which, in tracing the man’s investigation of a string of drug-related robberies in Philadelphia after he’s abruptly called back into the field, covers similar thematic ground as the earlier miniseries.
Tom’s fresh-faced team is looking into a biker gang called the Dark Hearts, whose drug houses are being raided by an unknown crew. Alongside Tom’s investigation, the series also follows one of the thieves, Robbie Prendergrast (Tom Pelphrey), a sanitation worker and family man who gets in over his head when a botched heist leaves him with much more than he bargained for.
Task’s suspense sequences, as in a home invasion and a protracted chase through a forest, are gripping. But as the character-driven panorama that it spends most of its time trying to be, the series focuses on all the wrong things, shaping its characters in the broadest of strokes and devising for them elaborate backstories that are quirky or tragic, though sometimes both. One member of Tom’s task force, Lizzie (Alison Oliver), gets a particularly cartoonish introduction, screaming at her ex over the phone before guiltily shuffling into the team meeting, where she proceeds to complain about how the room smells and reveals she hasn’t read the briefing.
Task’s approach to characterization is an exercise in maximalism. Concrete details and anecdotes are intended to illuminate the characters’ lives, but their sheer onslaught makes them feel artificial. We learn that Tom was once a priest, that he developed a drinking problem following his wife’s death, and that his adopted kids are tied up in court proceedings over their mother’s death. Ruffalo invests Tom with a rueful courage, but that’s not enough to make you believe that Task, for all its relentless detail, is out to explode the archetype of the good cop.
Where Mare of Easttown followed a detective enmeshed in her community, Task focuses on an outsider to the world he’s investigating. As such, it’s almost apt how this show’s interpersonal drama is always frustratingly bubbling around the edges of the barely related crime investigation. In a similar way, we get a sense of how Robbie’s home life is as tumultuous as Tom’s, what with the daughter (Emilia Jones) of his dead brother helping him take care of his two kids in the wake of his ex-wife abandoning the family, but his past dealings with the Dark Hearts are stubbornly pushed to the periphery of the narrative.
Considering just how inordinately focused Task is on the least interesting parts of its story, it’s all the more impressive just how human Robbie manages to feel. Certainly Ruffalo is the main draw, but it’s Pelphrey who leaves the biggest impression, his kind face peeking out from behind a scraggly beard. In this, it’s even harder not to compare Task with another recent and similarly flawed Philadelphia-set series about a drug robbery, Dope Thief, which operated on the inverse principle: that the robbers make for better television than the cops.
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