HBO’s new limited series Task opens as a character-driven crime drama anchored by Mark Ruffalo’s performance as FBI Special Agent Tom Brandis, who is pulled back into fieldwork while coping with a family tragedy. A review of the series’ first episode recommends streaming the show, noting its deliberate pacing, Delco-inflected setting and tonal kinship with creator Brad Ingelsby’s Mare of Easttown.
The premiere establishes Brandis as a man marked by loss and routine. He wakes slowly, plunges his face into a sink of ice water, listens to Phillies games on the radio and drinks vodka from a large souvenir cup. His wife Susan is gone and his son, Ethan, is awaiting sentencing for a violent crime that has shattered the family. Brandis, a former Catholic priest turned FBI agent, is asked to lead a task force investigating a string of drug-house robberies across Delaware and Montgomery counties — an assignment that brings him unwillingly back into the field.
Parallel to Brandis’s grief is the story of Robbie (Tom Pelphrey), a trash collector who scouts houses for drug production sites and carries out robberies with his partner Cliff (Raúl Castillo) and a younger accomplice known as Peaches (Owen Teague). Robbie lives in his late brother’s house with his children and shares tense arrangements with his niece Maeve (Emilia Jones), who legally owns the property and whose youthful priorities clash with his parental responsibilities. A heist intended to be lucrative goes wrong when the crew fails to anticipate a witness, setting off consequences that will drive the investigation.
The task force Brandis leads includes state and local officers: Lizzie Stover (Alison Oliver), whose personal life is in disarray; Aleah Clinton (Thuso Mbedu), who prefers order; and Anthony Grasso (Fabien Frankel), an organized-crime investigator. Martha Plimpton plays Brandis’s boss, Kathleen McGinty, delivering a performance reviewers singled out for its weary authority. Isaach De Bankolé appears as Father Daniel Georges, an old friend who underscores Brandis’s crisis of faith.
Reviewers have noted the series’ close tonal and geographic ties to Mare of Easttown. Both shows were created by Ingelsby, and Task leans into Philadelphia-area specificity with local references, Delco accents and a worldview shaped by long-term strain. The premiere takes time to sketch the interior lives of its principal characters rather than accelerating immediately into procedural action; that approach was described as a slow-build that will reward viewers who are patient with exposition and character detail.
The pilot offers few explicit scenes of sex or nudity. It focuses instead on emotional stakes, small domestic details and the mechanics of investigation, while leaving some procedural questions open — most notably why the FBI has taken the lead on a series of local robberies, beyond the possibility that the incidents intersect with broader drug trafficking concerns.
Critical reaction to the first episode centers on Ruffalo’s performance, which was called ‘‘excellent’’ for its portrayal of a man balancing professional competence with private collapse. The ensemble cast and Ingelsby’s attention to regional texture received positive mention, as did Plimpton’s portrayal of Brandis’s superior. Observers described the narrative as establishing sympathy for characters on both sides of the law, including Robbie, who is shown to be both a family man and willing to use lethal force when circumstances demand.
Task’s premiere sets its pieces into motion: the FBI task force is convened, the botched robbery introduces immediate peril, and the personal histories of Brandis and Robbie promise to complicate a conventional cops-and-robbers storyline. For viewers drawn to mood-driven, character-centered crime dramas and to fans of Ingelsby’s prior work, the series offers a slow-burning, location-rooted entry that reviewers recommended streaming.