‘Task’ Is the Show of the Year

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I knew I was 100% locked in on Task by the middle of its second episode. Up until that point, the series—starring Mark Ruffalo and Tom Pelphrey as cop and robber, with a vicious motorcycle gang in the middle—had the hallmarks of a solid and promising show, but was not quite unlike things we haven’t seen before, especially on HBO. All the standard checkmarks were there: Pensive protagonist, haunted by personal trauma, played by an A-list veteran. Likable criminals woefully in over their heads. Meditative scenes of characters chilling and having Deep Talks. A seemingly innocuous crime that goes heinously wrong at the end of the first hour to set the events in motion. A setting in an underrepresented region of America to give things a little flavor. All well executed, but familiar.

But once Special Agent Tom Brandis’s (Ruffalo) background research on the Dark Hearts—a motorcycle club being ripped off by a crew of thieves, robberies that threaten to escalate tensions in the street—reveals that one of the members was rumored to be murdered by his own club and we learn that Maeve, surly teenaged niece of Robbie, the guy leading those heists, is his daughter? A whole mythology clicked into place, one that immediately elevated Task from cool, prestige police procedural to Delco Greek tragedy, a tale about the ripples of violence and revenge, grief and loss, and the possibility of redemption, sponsored by Rita’s Italian Ice.

In that moment, the whole potential of the series and possible places the story could go unfolded before my eyes. And from there, Task exceeded those expectations, starting with the end of that episode—when Maeve, upon learning how Robbie’s been trying to avenge his brother/her father, immediately tries to walk back Robbie’s boneheaded decision, a move that blows up in her face spectacularly—all the way through to this week’s finale, which closed out with the proper amount of brutality and silver lining optimism.

I’m being intentionally vague here, because it seems like Task hasn’t exactly taken the timeline by storm the way your average Sunday-night HBO series typically unites everyone around the social media watercooler. It’s been kind of a soft year for the Home Box Office, but Task absolutely restored the feeling of the classic prestige crime dramas that the network built its reputation on, a legacy they consistently add to every couple of years.