I Watch TV: Task

 

Task (TV Series 2025)

Tom Bradis (Mark Ruffalo) is an FBI agent who is currently manning booths at recruitment fairs in Pennsylvania. He’s on this duty due to his wife dying as a result of Ethan, his adoptive son, having a mental health crisis and attacking her. He used to be a Catholic priest (he has another priest as a friend), then left the church to get married. He’s getting on with things, looking after Emily, Ethan’s sister. Coming up is Ethan’s sentencing, Tom hasn’t been to see him. His non-adoptive daughter Sara is coming for that, bringing her infant son with her.

He's brought back onto field duty after a gang have been raiding stash houses – houses used by drug dealers to store money and drugs – and stealing the money. They seem to have been mostly targeting the Dark Hearts motorcycle gang’s houses, and the Dark Hearts have been getting violent with rivals who they blame for it. Tom is to lead a multi-agency task force: him for the FBI; Lizzie Stover, an awkward and slapdash state trooper; Antony Grasso, a dashing county detective; and Aleah Clinton an efficient no-nonsense detective sergeant from the city of Chester. Chester is a suburb or commuter town for Philadelphia, the border between the rural territory of the Dark Hearts and the city drug gangs. The task force headquarters is a recently seized house from an unrelated case which Tom cleans up before they get there though both Grasso and Stover are unimpressed with it (Clinton has no obvious opinion).

The gang raiding the stash houses are led by Robbie Prendergast. He has a complex set of means and motives; first his brother was a Dark Heart who was murdered by them for having an affair with Eryn, who in turn is the partner of Jayson the head of the local Dark Hearts chapter. Secondly he’s a garbage man along with Cliff, another member of the gang. It turns out you can tell from the garbage what is a stash house. Thirdly he wants money to get away, to get out of this life which has fallen apart. His brother killed, his wife has left him. The house he and his two children are living in belongs to his niece Maeve; caring for the children has fallen onto her and she, aged 21, is starting to assert herself, annoyed at having to clean up after her uncle and cousins. She is furious when she brings a boyfriend back and Robbie, paranoid, confronts him. Fourthly, it turns out that Eryn, wanting to get away from the increasingly violent and erratic Jayson, is feeding Robbie information.

Events accelerate when Robbie, Cliff and the third member of the crew, Peaches (not a garbage man) hit a house that is supposed to have an especially large amount of money, enough for the three to retire and get away. The information is out of date and the fentanyl is still there; worse still they are interrupted by another gang member and shoot it out. The three bikers and Peaches are killed; Sam, the young son of one of the bikers is there and Robbie takes him with him to shield him from seeing his parents’ death. Sam likes it at Robbie’s house (actually Maeve’s) especially the chickens.

With a new raid the Task Force go into action, following up all the dead bodies. Two things come to light; the bikers were killed with a gun previously used in a Dark Hearts related killing and they realise a child was in the house. By this time Robbie and Cliff are trying to use contacts to sell the fentanyl, leading them into danger and double-cross. Maeve realises who Sam is when he’s on the news as a missing child and tries to drop him off at the mall she works at, calling in a tip, but this goes wrong. Despite meeting Tom, Maeve has to take Sam back. Meanwhile Jayson is told by his mentor from the national Dark Hearts leadership that whoever attacked them must be dealt with, and Sam brought back. When the Task Force set up a trap, they find Cliff has been misdirected to an ambush by the Dark Hearts. Tom is forced to the conclusion that someone on his team is leaking information.

This then is a twisting, complicated and gritty crime drama. Mark Ruffalo as Tom Bradis, a man who is not fit to return to duty (the family conflict is what, if any, statement they will make at the sentencing, and Tom admits he doesn’t know in an early confrontation) and also distinctly middle-aged. This story line doesn’t fit neatly with the crime plots, with Sam’s journey, with the complex family dynamic of the Prendergasts. Or maybe it does; this is a story about things spinning out of control, everyone having to do things is situations that they’re thrust into unwillingly, or that have got more serious and dangerous than they thought they were signing up for. And many of the reasons they’re there is because of family, either supporting family or trying to improve things. So this second major story, essentially unconnected plot or character (other than by Tom), does have something to say thematically – by starting, ending and going by a different route to the others.

That it does not quite fit together, that both Tom and Robbie remain conflicted even as each act decisively, that both try despite all to keep their families together – that all this is not neat or even especially satisfying, and that there are half a dozen characters and story lines I’ve not mentioned – all this and I still think this is good. It’s a drama, it’s a crime story, it does all that.

Watch This: Superior crime story, drama, and crime drama with good performances, fine setpieces, and a lot of grit and detail
Don’t Watch This: People get murdered, a child kidnapped, trust betrayed, all to tell us men need to figure stuff out