This time it didn’t have to be a ‘whodunnit’. Scenarist Brad Ingelsby had that form with his previous, much -praised series Mare of Easttown already used. Successfully: the HBO series in which a police officer played by Kate Winslet in the town of Easttown in the US state of Pennsylvania has to solve the murder of a young girl, kept viewers in tension in 2021 and let them guess at the denouement.
But Ingelsby did not just want to repeat the same trick with his new series Task. “I wanted to make an exciting, dramatic thriller again. And I also knew that it had to be a crime series again. But this time I wanted to hold the attention of the audience in a different way,” says the screenwriter during a video call with a number of journalists to promote the seven episodes counting series.
Ingelsby therefore thought that the tension of two characters had to be on a collision course. A collision that the viewer sees coming from afar, but this time it is guessing when the two meet and – especially – how it ends.
The characters are Tom, an FBI agent who was a priest in a previous life (played by Mark Ruffalo), and Robbie, a garbage collector who attacks drug buildings in his spare time (Tom Pelphrey). Men who had already drawn Ingelby completely before he really had an idea why and how their lives would cross each other. “I always start from the characters,” says the screenwriter. And laughing: “I wish I was better to think of storylines. But I don’t know how to do it differently.”
Failure
Bee Mare of Easttown Was there, in Ingelsby, first the image of a mother who in all respects had the feeling that she was failing, in her work as a detective but also at home. Something he thought it was not really visible on TV before; After all, it is usually the TV fathers who fail in education.
This time there was an idea of an ex-priest and a garbage collector. The first, the character that would eventually become Ruffalo’s Tom, is slightly based on Ingelby’s own uncle. A man who left the priesthood after thirty years when he married a woman. Now Ingelsby’s uncle has not become a FBI agent, such as Tom in the series, but a background of service to faith, God, and especially to a community, the writer found an interesting characteristic for an FBI agent. “As far as I am concerned, Tom is not a particularly intuitive agent. He is not someone who enters a room and sees instructions that others have missed,” says Ingelsby. “Tom can get along well with a weapon. But his real super power is in my opinion compassion, the opportunity to see people and to recognize their problems and fears.” He also thought that was something that you don’t often see in agents on TV.
Robbie, the second protagonist, arrived after a conversation with the police chief of the real Easttown in Pennsylvania who was previously an advisor Mare of Easttown. Ingelsby: “He told me how postmen and garbage collectors know everything from us they come through your residential area once or twice a week, they know which post you get, what you eat, what you throw away. And they are completely invisible. That resonated enormously with me.” The image of a garbage collector who, thanks to his profession, knows exactly in which houses drugs will be made (and therefore knows where money can be made), then quickly took shape in Ingelsby’s head.
Vodka
The series turns the lives of these two different men nicely against each other from the outset. When we meet Tom, he spends his days on soapy professional grants behind the FBI information table and drowns his evenings in large cups of Wodka. Something that watches his daughter living at home with visible sorrow, which reveals that this habit is new and that the man is struggling with a great sorrow.
Tom is therefore not going to really get back to work again, to his chef at the FBI (a role of Martha Plimton) forced him – there is no one else – makes the head of a new ‘Task Force’. The man is assigned three young agents and a derelict house in the forests as headquarters, and to find out the task of finding out which robbers disguised the drug premises in Deleware County with Halloween masks. Because the trade in drugs in this piece of Pennsylvania is in the hands of rival motorcycle gangs, and they suspect each other of the robberies, a gang war threatens. Tom must prevent this.
Robbie, one of the robbers behind the Halloween masks, is in turn introduced by the series as a cordial man. A loving father and good friend with a warm smile. He lives with his niece Maeve (Emilia Jones) and his two small children in the house that belonged to his deceased brother, and prefers to swim in an old, enchantingly beautiful mine shaft. He is a man who makes clear mistakes, but it seems to be good. Only when he rises a drug building halfway through the first episode with his fellow packaging man Cliff (Raul Castillo), and does not shy away from violence, is it clear that Robbie is not only friendly. Even if it is too late, because then you have long closed it as a viewer – also thanks to Pelphrey’s beautiful acting – in your heart for a long time.
The latter is exactly what screenwriter Ingelby was on. That the viewer is going to give just as much to the FBI agent, as the criminal garbage collector. “One of the things I thought was so great about the movie Heat When I looked it years ago, the fact that you as a viewer were hoping that Robert would escape the Niro if you wanted Pacino to get hold of him, even if you knew that one ended the other. If we have done our work well, you want Tom to solve the case in the same way, and at the same time that Robbie succeeds in getting away. ”
Although the story is all about a kind of cat-and-mouse game, Ingelsby is reluctant to put his new series away in that genre box. Task According to him, it is primarily a character study of people under pressure to give you as a viewer, despite their mistakes. Ingelsby: “And in the end the plot is just an excuse to spend time with these characters.”
Task. HBO Max, weekly, 7 episodes. Every Monday.