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The HBO series Task is a grim but, if you stick with it, a stealthily hopeful drama from the creator of Mare of Easttown.
Like Mare, it's set in the Philly suburbs and features a great cast hurtling themselves against the Philly regional accent.
But where Mare was a murder mystery, Task is a cat and mouse crime thriller featuring Mark Ruffalo as a world-weary FBI agent, reluctantly dragged back into the field to investigate a series of crimes among rival gangs.
Drugs, stolen money, family drama kidnapping shootouts grief, forgiveness and, of course, water ice.
This is NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour.
I'm Glenn Weldon, and we're talking TASC.
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Hey, it's Rachel Martin.
I'm the host of Wildcard from NPR.
For a lot of my years as a radio host, silence sort of made me nervous.
That pause before an answer because you don't know what's going on on the other side of the mic.
But these days, I love it.
Hmm.
Ah.
Gosh.
Give me a minute.
Yeah, yeah.
Think.
Listen to the Wildcard podcast only from NPR.
How does a fringe stance on banning immigrants from so-called third world countries influence some of the most powerful policymakers in the US?
Mainstream normie.
Republican politicians are willing to talk about total level of immigration, including legal immigration, being too high.
You can hear more about that on Code Switch from NPR, wherever you get your podcasts.
Joining me today is Waylon Wong.
She's the co-host of NPR's Daily Economics podcast, The Indicator from Planet Money.
Hey, Waylon.
Hello from Lefty's Taproom.
Excellent.
Also with us is Vulture TV critic Raksana Haddadi.
Welcome back, Raksana.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Of course.
Let's get to it.
In Task.
Mark Ruffalo plays Tom, an FBI agent who's been assigned to a desk ever since his family was struck by a tragedy that's left him and his teenage daughter mired in grief.
Tom Pelfrey plays Robbie, a sanitation worker who moonlights as a thief, raiding drug houses for reasons of his own reasons, tied up with his own grief over the death of his brothers.
He lives with his late brother's daughter, Maeve, played by Amelia Jones, who is terrific.
Robbie's wife has left him.
Maeve is now very reluctantly taking care of his kids.
Tom's boss, played by Martha Plimpton, yay puts him in charge of a task force to investigate Robbie's drug raids.
Task was created by Brad Inglesby.
It's airing on HBO and streaming on HBO Max.
Waylon, did this hold any water for you?
Okay.
Yeah, I really like this.
I like the structure of it.
You know, like you mentioned, it's a cat and mouse, not a whodunit.
And in this case, it's like a three-way cat and mouse with a bit of who's the mole thrown in.
So I really like that.
I like the pacing and the kind of doling out of information.
That worked for me.
Performances really, really worked for me.
Yeah.
Pretty much everyone to me felt like a complete human being and the world felt really filled in.
I loved the setting.
I loved the kind of juxtaposition of like a very verdant Delaware County and quarries and woods with, you know, some grittier urban landscapes and kind of glum suburban strip mall settings.
And I like that even small characters would get these moments that really made them feel like human beings that had a role to play in the story.
Yep.
What?
Like, we don't need this many sad things.
We could have done a Coco Chanel thing and taken off one sad thing before we left the house.
And the story, like the just like the thriller element of it, would have been perfectly nice and suspenseful and entertaining without, like the absolute, incredibly heavy, heavy baggage that this character comes in with.
That to me was like a demerit.
But otherwise, I would recommend the show to my friends.
I really liked it.
That's a great take.
Okay Roxanna, listeners should really read your excellent Vulture review because, A it's beautifully written, as always, but B it's also really well argued.
It had me reevaluating my own reaction to the show and considering the show from different angles, which is let's remember please, what great criticism does.
It's what it's for.
But hit me with it.
What'd you think?
Thank you.
Well, first, thank you.
I appreciate that.
And then it's so interesting because I think my take is the exact opposite, in that the family drama stuff is why I cared about the show and why I cared about the performances and all of the drug dealing stuff.
Robbie being a robber.
Did you get it like that whole thing?
I said this in my review and I will say it again it really was like FX, early aughts, Sons of Anarchy, light.
None of that really felt believable to me.
But the show is so intentional in its editing and in its framing and in its blocking to tell you how Tom and Robbie are two fathers of daughters and how their paths are sort of parallel.
I really liked the domestic stuff and sort of the question of if you as a man feel like or aimless, how does that sort of permeate the people around you?
And how do you sort of I don't want to say ruin their lives, because that's sort of dramatic, but the series almost suggests that right.
That like your male loneliness can end up trapping the people around you.
And I was really fascinated by that.
I'm like a real sucker for like what's wrong with men these days.
So I really liked that.
But man, I am hearing people compare this with heat and I really need people to calm down.
That's a comparison that is sort of killing me.
All right.
Well, I kind of agree and disagree with both of you for different reasons.
So let's start off with the surface stuff first.
My parents grew up in Delaware County.
A lot of my aunts and uncles and cousins are still there.
I think they would all give this the Delco seal of approval, because this thing rushes to establish its Philly bona fides in the first five minutes.
I mean, Ruffalo's driving into work.
We get KYW Newsradio, traffic on the twos, blue route, tick, tick, tick.
Next morning, he says, I made scrambled eggs and scrapple.
I could stop by the Acme.
Maybe I'll drop by for a—wait for it.
Maybe I'll drop by for a water race.
I mean we are five minutes in and we've already won Philly Bingo and we didn't need the free space.
It's amazing.
And I just want to shout out real quick Michael Tenenbaum in The Philly Voice, who is recapping the show and cataloging every single regional reference.
I love my people.
Would I be as invested as I am in the show if it was set in, like, the Pittsburgh suburbs?
You know, Lancaster freaking county?
That's an open question.
But my way in is so specific.
Because something I noticed, if you remember how, in Mare of Easttown, every actor threw themselves neck deep into the accent.
Ruffalo isn't.
Ruffalo is hitting it, but he's not Evan Peters-ing it, right?
He's...
I'm reading him.
It makes me think about this character.
It makes me read him as a guy who grew up with that accent, around that accent, but who worked very hard to get rid of it, which is a real thing that happens.
Hi, my name's Glenn.
Have you met me?
So it only comes out once. when he's not thinking about it.
So I felt like that worked for me.
I ultimately found the show incredibly rewarding because I thought it was going to be one thing.
I thought it was going to be.
The prestige police procedural is being marketed as but, like Roxanna, what I found was something that was a lot shaggier and more rumpled and character study ish.
But does that feeling of subverted expectations jibe with your experience, Waylon?
Or was the show kind of what you thought it was going to be?
I think honestly, the show was what I thought it was going to be, which was this kind of crime drama.
But I did love all of the subtle character moments that established the ways in which these characters, as flawed as they are, are trying to care for the people around them.
And so I think I was pleasantly surprised by the emotional depth that we got from the characters in a way that you don't necessarily need that right.
But they really do make you sit with the emotional stuff to these pretty heavy themes of fatherhood and the male loneliness epidemic.
And I keep coming back to, like, there's this moment in the pilot when Robbie is peeling an apple.
He's sitting with his friend Cliff, who he's robbing the drug houses with, and they're talking about their hopes and dreams.
And Robbie is peeling this apple in this way.
That's like a cool guy thing to do on film where you're peeling it with a penknife.
And he's peeling it, and he's cutting off pieces, and he's sharing pieces of this apple with Cliff.
And to me as a Chinese person, cutting up fruit for someone else and sharing a piece of cut fruit with someone else is like the ultimate act of like familial love and care.
To me it just spoke volumes, you know, and it's like again, the show didn't need to do that.
You know, these actors, you know, are just like suffusing these, like small moments with such depth to me.
So that was like a great emotional kind of upside of watching this show.
What little humor there is in this very dark show is in Martha Plimpton.
Oh, so funny.
She is always eating.
She's doing the Brad Pitt in the Oceans movies.
I love me a mid-career Plimpton.
They want me to put together a task force.
I know.
I'm sorry.
I assigned Maria Herrera to lead, but she got ordered to bed rest.
What is it?
Something about a leaky uterus.
What's the job?
Sorry.
She is playing a little bit of an archetype, you know, but you know when it's done well, you're like.
Can I tell you this is a bad idea.
Yeah, she's doing that.
And then later on she does get to like run around and do kind of FBI gun waving stuff, which is also very exciting.
You know she's not just behind a desk being like Get your act together whatever, like these bosses say in these guys' stories.
I'm going to take your badge.
I'm going to take your gun.
Get your act together.
She's doing that.
Not saying she's not doing that.
I do think the men, for the most part, are better written than the women.
Agreed.
With the exception of Maeve, who I think is pretty well-rounded in her frustration with being stuck in this town.
What is it that you're missing here?
I don't know what I'm missing because I never had anything.
I thought we were in this together.
First my dad dies, then Karen takes off.
And I'm here raising our kids.
Your kids.
I mean, what the f*** do I know about raising kids?
My partner has said this about my taste, which is that I love watching guys being dudes.
And this show has a lot of guys being dudes, but in ways you wouldn't expect.
Exactly like was said with the cut fruit.
There are these moments where these men swim in like a quarry together.
There is a lot of really tender friendship stuff there that I think is just really well articulated.
And I think the performances elevate it even more.
I do think Ruffalo is like really perfect in this.
He has not worked for me lately when he's gone big.
Like I did not really care for him in Poor Things or in Mickey 17.
But I think he just, he's so tired in this.
And I think that really works.
He's been through a lot.
He's been through a lot.
No one's been through more than this guy.
My man is exhausted, and I think that really helps.
And I think Pelfrey is doing something also really interesting.
I think most people will know him from Ozark.
And I think this is really like a magnificent showcase for how deep he can go.
And I also really I really enjoy Fabian Frankel in this too, because he has sort of like a, you think, at first very predictable hot shot, young cop personality, personality which i think takes on some additional texture.
I don't know.
Like the plotting of this thing, i think, really takes its time and i really think it tests you to stick with it.
There is something sort of inevitable that happens, i think, but i just think it takes a little bit too long to get there.
Man, i don't know, i i just think it tested us.
You already mentioned Amelia Jones as Maeve.
That's a great performance.
I think the writing is actually as you mentioned Roxanne, I think the writing is doing her a good service, the way it doesn't do a lot of the other women in the show.
She gets the sum up line of the series and it comes at the end of the second episode.
She says to Robbie, what have you done to us?
What have you done to us?
The question I pose to all destructive men everywhere.
What have you done to us?
Also, not for nothing, great accent.
Just up to the line without going over.
It's all in the vowels.
You can hear it.
It's there.
And we haven't talked about this character, this boy Sam, who Robbie essentially, I would say kidnaps.
You should say it.
It's a friendly kidnapping.
Yeah.
And then they're sort of grappling with Sam.
That young actor is so compelling.
So compelling.
Good.
All the kids in this are good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The scenes that he has with Maeve, I think, are really getting at the question of this show, which is like what do we transfer to the generations that come after us?
Like, what sort of trauma and pain do they absorb by being in our presence?
That all is so good.
Again, it's like you sort of want to, like, rearrange the board of some of these pieces.
Because I think they really nailed the central concept.
And then in building it out, we sort of see, like, the growing pains of the show.
Well, here's where I agree and disagree with you both.
I mean, like, I think the motorcycle gang stuff wasn't where my heart was.
I like the Cat and Mouse crime thriller stuff fine.
Men talking about their feelings, but specifically grief, how grief works, how grief is a thing that happens in the wake of a death, that it's like, this physical process that your body puts you through.
It has a beginning, middle and an end.
Although, you know, sometimes the end gets kind of feathery and lingering.
And what ties these two men together?
And this is like the show does all these kind of facile parallels between them.
What really ties them is that they both screwed up the grief process in different ways.
Tom has reasons that he couldn't fully engage with that process because we learned in the pilot that the loss of his wife is the result of a crime that happened within the family unit.
Right.
So his grief is of necessity, not clean, not pure.
It's complicated.
It's mediated.
It's tangled.
And Robbie is different.
Robbie has gone through the grief process, but he is still in it.
He didn't let it end.
He's holding on to it.
And in both those cases, it's going to twist you up in a very specific way.
It's going to convince you, as both of these men are convinced at the start of the story, that forgiveness, which the show is all about, forgiveness is something that absolutely no one should give out because absolutely no one ever deserves it, which It's a really poisonous view of the world and it's not sustainable, but that's where both of these characters are.
That's the thing that these two characters share.
We know that these two characters are going to come together in some way.
That's not a spoiler.
So we won't say how or why, but these two actors do end up sharing the screen at some point.
And that to me is the make or break part of the show.
So look, it was hilarious Roxanna, that you pointed out people were comparing this to Heat, because this was never going to be De Niro and Pacino.
Yeah.
Because these are not two characters who are crackling with electricity.
It's not going to be a volatile chemistry, because these are two chronic depressives commiserating right.
But it's that commiseration that makes the show for me, because what's happening in those brief scenes is that both of these very broken men are smart enough to realize that they're headed toward disaster.
Each of them struggling to prevent it, both for themselves and for each other.
And it's the for each other thing which I find kind of, you know, heartening.
I mean, the most interesting thing about the show, of course, is that, even though they're enemies in the eyes of the law, their real issues aren't with each other.
They're with other people in their lives.
There is something hopeful in those scenes.
I guess my frustration is...
I think that the end, I will say that a certain arc to me did not feel entirely earned.
And so I think there's just a little bit of like a finger press of you should feel that this is hopeful and that, like we achieved catharsis, and that we have reached a point now where certain characters have dealt with their issues differently.
I think there could have been another episode of perhaps more distinct grappling with all of that guilt and grief that we have talked about.
But what I will say is yeah, that meeting and what you are getting out of it Glenn, I do think that that is like valuable and worth watching the show for.
I would just say maybe don't watch it week to week.
Maybe binge it.
Oh, that's a good point.
Like you think it'll be really unsatisfying tuning in week to week.
Interesting.
Yeah.
And that's so atypical for me to say because I love a weekly watch.
But I really think that this like gathers steam in a certain way, when you are sort of like binging those first five episodes together.
And what I will say is like in some ways – and this is maybe like a galaxy-brained comparison –
But in some ways, it reminded me of like season one of The Bear and like the carmy, richy dynamic.
And I think that sort of like men trying to figure out who they are to each other.
If that is your bag, I think that you should binge the first five and then go from there with the rest of the show.
In your review, your excellent review, you used a C word, which is chore.
You described this as a chore, Roxanna.
Yeah.
I said it sometimes feels a bit like a chore.
I have one very shallow thing to say, which is that Mark Ruffalo with his little beer belly running around with his FBI vest on and the gun and the flashlight and stuff.
I'm sorry.
He's not looked this hunky to me since 13 going on 30.
I took a picture of my TV like a boomer, like sent it to a group chat, being like look at Mark Ruffalo.
That's so funny.
That is funny.
There's a pot for every lid.
He is very paunch forward in this.
There's like an exceptional edit where the biker gang is sort of dismissing his involvement and we cut directly to him eating a sub.
And like a really messy way, the way I eat is stuff falling out everywhere.
Okay, people.
Hoogie, please.
Oh, excuse me.
I'm so sorry.
But yeah, those details.
That's the cold cut meat of the show.
There you go.
Okay.
Well, tell us what you think about Dask.
We're on Facebook.
We're on Letterboxd.
Or maybe, if you see us down to shore, maybe we can hop on our bikes and grab a hegi and some water ice.
Go birds.
And that brings us to the end of our show.
Waylon Wong, Roxana Haddadi, thank you so much for being here.
Thanks.
Thank you.
This episode was produced by Liz Metzger, Carly Rubin and Mike Katziff and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy, and Hello Command provides our theme music.
Thanks for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
I'm Glenn Wilden, and we'll see you all next time.
At Alt Latino, we celebrate Latin music all year round.
But during Latin Music Month, we really amp it up.
Once again, we're turning the tiny desk into el tiny and bringing you 11 hot off the desk performances.
Hear musical giants like Gloria Estefan in a more intimate setting.
And get to know newer artists like Macario Martinez.
Celebrate Latinidad with us all month long on the Alt Latino podcast from NPR.
We all wonder about life's big questions.
Why are we here?
What are we to do?
And how to make sense of it all?
On Ye Gods with Scott Carter.
I talk with politicos priests, actors and atheists on how they wrestle with life's mysteries.
Their stories will spark reflection, challenge assumptions and maybe even bring you some clarity on your own journey.
Listen to Ye Gods, part of the NPR network, wherever you get your podcasts.
