Task series premiere: More than just a robbery
We knew entering the Task series premiere on HBO that we would be witnessing a drama as dark and gritty as any we’ve seen all year. Was the payoff fully there?
Well, through one episode, we can say that creator Brad Ingelsby has crafted another human crime drama that bears similarities to his former work in Mare of Easttown, one that features characters across the moral spectrum with reasons for their actions. Given that Mark Ruffalo is the star of the series, it would be fair to assume that he would receive the lion’s share of the screen time. However, that was not necessarily the case.
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Instead, what we saw through the hour-plus premiere was a pretty panoramic look at a Pennsylvania community that became the setting for a brutal robbery, one led by Robbie, a man who can bury (at least at times) his darkness under the surface. The story works with great effort to show that he is not just a carbon-copy criminal, but someone still capable of doing some extremely dark things.
Perhaps the most complicated part of the premiere overall comes in the closing minutes, when it is revealed that Sam, the young boy at the center of the robbery, was not killed. Instead, he was taken from the scene. Tom and the rest of his team were able to determine that he was there at the time of the incident, and this does lead to a lot of interesting questions. A missing child is always going to lead to a vamped-up law enforcement presence, regardless of the reasoning for Robbie and his crew to do what they do.
As for Tom, he is settling quite nicely into the role of jaded hero one episode in. You already get a sense of him as a guy determined to do his job, though not someone who really is out relishing in the glory of it. While the Task premiere may not have generated a singular buzzworthy moment from our vantage point, it did establish some table-setting that will hopefully be paid off more and more as time progresses.
Related – Learn more about what else is ahead on Task season 1 episode 2
What did you think about the Task series premiere on HBO?
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