“Men do not despise a thief,” it says in the Book of Proverbs, “if he steals to satisfy his soul when he is hungry.” That is the Christian interpretation of an age-old moral conundrum: is it OK to filch a loaf of bread to feed your family? From Oliver Twist to Les Misérables, via The Grapes of Wrath, this is a theme that writers love to explore, and it’s a thread that is picked up, once again, by a new Sky Atlantic crime drama, Task.
Robbie (Tom Pelphrey) is a single parent, living in rural Pennsylvania with his kids and his niece Maeve (Emilia Jones), whose father, Robbie's brother, has recently died. By day, he’s a binman, but under cover of nightfall, he and his buddy Cliff (Raúl Castillo) conduct a series of daring burglaries on a drug dealing biker gang, the Dark Hearts. Across town, FBI agent Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo) has been off active duty since his wife was killed by their son during a psychotic episode. But he’s dragged back onto the streets when he’s put in charge of a taskforce to investigate this string of robberies, which have culminated in a suspected child abduction. Both men – Robbie and Tom – are grieving, torn between confronting their trauma and running from it. But poor decisions beget poor decisions, and soon the stakes are irretrievably high, and a crash, back to earth, becomes inevitable.
“What have you done to us?” Maeve asks her uncle as the scale of consequences becomes apparent. Task’s writer, Brad Ingelsby, previously wrote Mare of Easttown, a (slightly) surprise success for Sky, which led to him signing a three-year exclusive deal with the American broadcaster HBO. Like Mare, Task is concerned with the intersection of the professional and the private. Kate Winslet’s detective had to unravel the murder of a young girl as she continued to deal with her son’s suicide; Ruffalo’s detective must balance the sentencing of his son, whom he feels unable to forgive, with his return to the front line. It blurs the distinctions between both the victims and perpetrators of crimes and the men and women charged with investigating them. Ingelsby’s world is a monochrome grey, where everyone is dealing with the impact of human frailty.
Ruffalo is a casting director’s dream. He has that rare ability to appear both suave and schlubby. He can play an intellectual, an everyman, or something in between. His reticent detective employs a sprinkling of all these dynamics, at times a charismatic field agent, at others a mournful introvert. Ingelsby is clearly a fan of British television (Mare of Easttown owes the sort of debt of gratitude to Happy Valley that is sometimes settled in court) and Agent Brandis is right out of the Colin Dexter extended universe. “I majored in philosophy as an undergrad and then became a priest for eight years,” he informs us, a Morse/Hathaway hybrid. And as with Dexter’s Oxford-set series, this allows for ruminations on the nature of justice. “When things go terribly wrong, people want to know why God let it happen,” Tom confesses. “It’s easy to talk about forgiveness when it’s not your loss.”
All of this moral and philosophical reflection is good. It lends the show a sense of purpose amid the internecine drug wranglings. But in a crime drama, both the crime and the drama have to work, and Task’s criminal endeavours are messy. Pelphrey just about keeps Robbie sympathetic, but his dealings with gun-toting bikers and fentanyl pushers feel generic and uninspired. Where Mare of Easttown used a classic murder mystery to explore generational trauma, Task is more interested in the “man turns to life of crime, gets out of his depth” genre (a la Breaking Bad, Ozark, Your Honor, etc), which has been so popular in recent years that it’s now ready for a fresh twist. And so, Task ends up feeling more of a generic piece with its tonal siblings. A cat-and-mouse game between criminals and the authorities set in America’s drug-addicted working-class communities. That’s a story we’ve seen before.
But Ingelsby tells it well, and he’s assembled a fine cast here. A trio of young British and Irish actors – House of the Dragon’s Fabian Frankel, Saltburn’s Alison Oliver, and CODA’s Jones – demonstrate how good these islands still are at exporting bright, young things (with convincing American accents). Even if it doesn’t prove as compulsive viewing as Ingelsby’s previous work, Task is grown-up, sophisticated, well-made drama. Life is hard, the show argues, and it hardens the people who endure it.
