Is HBO’s Task “the best crime thriller of the year”?

Now streaming first on Showmax, Task has an 89% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with Wall Street Journal calling it “perhaps the best crime thriller of the year.”

Four-time Oscar nominee Mark Ruffalo plays Tom, a former priest turned FBI agent heading up a task force trying to put an end to a string of violent robberies. Emmy nominee Tom Pelphrey (Ozark) co-stars as Robbie, a garbage collector who is stealing drug money from a local motorcycle gang. 

The stacked cast includes South African star Thuso Mbedu, BAFTA nominee Emilia Jones (CODA), Jamie McShane (Wednesday, 1923), Alison Oliver (Saltburn) and Fabien Frankel (Ser Criston Cole in House of the Dragon). 

Creator Brad Ingelsby set Task in the same working-class Philadelphia suburbs as his four-time Emmy winner predecessor, Mare of Easttown. This is home for him: Brad lives in Chester County, while he and his parents grew up in Delaware County, where his extended family still resides, including his four siblings. 

“I like writing characters and stories set in this region of Pennsylvania,” says Brad. “I wasn’t scared to return to a place I’ve come to know so well because it’s the blood in my veins, and I knew there was more material to mine.”

While Task and Mare of Easttown share similar DNA, they are two very distinct shows, according to executive producer Mark Roybal, who has worked closely with Ingelsby for 15 years. “Task lives in the same world as its predecessor, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, but it’s more of a propulsive action-thriller in the vein of Michael Mann’s Heat, which Brad looked to when he was writing the show. This gives Task its own distinct rhythm and energy.”

Mark Ruffalo as Tom

Brad says casting Tom was the biggest challenge, because he had so many conflicting personalities on the page: former parish priest, theologian, intellectual, law enforcement professional, father and husband.

“His superpower isn’t that he’s a great agent,” say Brad. “He’s not exceptionally perceptive or an ace interrogator. It's his view of the world that makes him different from every other agent. His superpower is his empathy.”

“Mark delivers that in spades,” adds Brad. “He gives you multiple perspectives on an already complex character who’s seen and experienced a lot in life.”

For help in bringing authenticity to the character, Brad turned to Scott A Duffey, a former seminarian turned FBI agent who is a veteran of several violent crime task forces in suburban Philadelphia.

Brad also hails from a family of priests. The lightbulb moment for the character of Tom came when Brad’s uncle, an Augustinian priest, left the church. “Tom is a character whose faith has been tested and who is struggling to understand suffering in the world,” says Brad. “Everything Tom holds as truth has come tumbling down because of this tragedy in his life. He comes to doubt what guided him as a parish priest working in hospitals and telling people everything is going to be okay. Suddenly he realises that it’s easy to say when it’s not you.”

Both Tom and Robbie are father figures under pressure in their home lives to keep their families together; both are fundamentally decent men looking for meaning in their fractured lives. 

“The sense of duty and family I observed growing up in Delaware County has become a subject I’m very passionate about,” says Ingelsby. “I’m attracted to stories about working-class people that get up every day and maybe aren’t living the lives they dreamed about or aren’t working the jobs they wanted. But they clock in and out of their shift and provide for their families in ways I’ve always found to be heroic.”

“Brad is a master at telling real stories and Task brings humanity even to the people who are supposed to be criminals,” says two-time Emmy nominee Salli Richardson-Whitfield (The Gilded Age, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakes Dynasty), who directed three episodes, including the pivotal sixth episode, with its 17-minute chase sequence through the woods. “You come to care about both groups of people: the side of law enforcement and the sides that are breaking the law.”

New episodes of Task drop on Showmax every Monday, express from the US. 

Watch the trailer for Task