TV Show Review: Task. There are a ton of crime drama series…

There are a ton of crime drama series, each with its own arc and storyline. At the core of the series are the police trying to catch the bad guys in the mix of other interplays. Task does something unusual with its crime drama, and it was so unprepared that I found myself going from meh to wait a minute, there’s something here.

Premise

This isn’t your off‑the‑shelf crime drama. Task drops you into working‑class Philadelphia, where a grieving FBI agent, Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo), is pulled back into the field when a string of violent robberies hits the suburbs. What makes it interesting: on the other side, you’ve got Robbie (Tom Pelphrey), a garbage‑truck driver turned mask‑wielding raider, stealing from drug houses to right real or imagined wrongs.

The Plot

As simple as the premise is, it gets a bit more complicated when you take a deep dive into the lives of the task and the FBI agent played by Mark Ruffalo. What would you do if your adopted son accidentally killed your wife? Would you help to have them back home? Permanently incarcerated? Would you forgive? Forget? What’s the way forward exactly? Yeah, as you ponder on that, imagine having to channel your focus on finding robbers while not being sure of the task force you have been assigned.

The Story

The show is heavy, emotionally heavy. Ruffalo plays Tom like a man drowning in regret and trying to resurface. Pelphrey’s Robbie is messier, violent, and desperate, and it’s one of those performances you can’t look away from.

But, and yeah, there’s a but, Task doesn’t always move at lightning speed. It lingers. It lets the grief and the heaviness settle. If you’re in the mood for something punchy and fast, you might get impatient. And some of the supporting characters and side‑plots feel familiar, almost too familiar like you’ve seen this kind of “good cop, bad man, one big mistake” story before.

Still, if you’re up for a slow burn that hits you in the gut, this is worth your time. The best parts are when the show stops being about “who did it” and turns into “why did they do it” and “what happens when you can’t undo what you did”. It leaves you thinking longer than the runtime.

Final Thought

Task isn’t light entertainment. It’s dense, emotional, dark. You will need patience to get through the first episode because it is very slow, very, very slow. So slow you would want to give up, but it’s at this point that you must bear patience and push through. By the third episode, things become a bit better, yet the overall idea of the series is not in its robberies, shooting, betrayal, kidnapping or cat and mouse chase, but in the lives of people in play.

We have two men on opposite sides of the law and life, doing everything they can to survive their pasts. If you’re cool with a show that’s more about pain than punch‑ups, you’ll find something here. If you just want quick thrills, maybe look elsewhere.