After two months in a time capsule that transported us to the gilded drama of wealthy New Yorkers in the 19th century with The Gilded Age, HBO now, with Task, takes us to rural, working-class, and decidedly unglamorous Pennsylvania — ironically, Marian Brook’s homeland — for a story that hooks us in the very first minutes and refuses to let go.

And it’s no coincidence that the immediate comparison of Task is to Mare of Easttown. Both shows were created by Brad Ingelsby, a storyteller who has found in his own home turf not just a backdrop, but the dramatic heartbeat of his series. If Mare gave us a detective crushed by grief, here Ingelsby returns to a similar starting point — a broken hero, drinking to numb the weight of life but still brilliant at his job — only this time, instead of a “whodunit,” he crafts a drama that sets protagonist and antagonist face to face, two men who might as well be reflections of one another.

The first episode, “Crossings”, sets this tone right away with something almost domestic: Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo) asking his daughter if she wants to stop by Rita’s after school, while he sips from an oversized Phillies plastic cup. The detail matters. We’re back in a world of thick accents, water ice, and “youse guys,” where every corner breathes Philadelphia and every character carries that identity in their speech. Ingelsby wants us to know this is familiar ground — but the story will cut differently.

Tom is a semi-retired FBI agent who spends his days at job fairs recruiting potential agents. But when a string of violent robberies rattles the area, he’s pulled back into the field, tasked with leading a special unit. He is already a man of scars: once a priest, now a widower, and a father estranged from his adopted son who awaits sentencing for an undisclosed crime. Tom refuses to visit him, even though the sentence could stretch from five to fifteen years. His pain doesn’t paralyze him — it hardens him, makes him sharper, more cynical, more prone to drink from those plastic cups. He is, as some have noted, a Columbo for our times: messy, melancholic, but brilliant at what he does.

On the other side, we meet Robbie Prendergrast (Tom Pelphrey), a garbage collector by day who moonlights as the mastermind behind a crew pulling off smash-and-grab robberies on local drug dealers. The logic is simple: who’s going to call the cops on stolen money that was illegal to begin with? Pelphrey nails the accent and the rawness so completely that it’s almost frightening. Robbie feels like he was pulled straight from South Street, the kind of guy who shouts “Whiz Wit!” at a cheesesteak counter — and yet he dreams of escaping it all to lounge in a hammock on some island in Canada.

Robbie, however, is not a cutout villain. He’s a father of two, abandoned by his wife, and raising his children with the help of his niece Maeve (Emilia Jones), who herself has been dealt too much trauma for her years. Her father — Robbie’s brother — was murdered, though the circumstances remain murky. Maeve speaks of misery and feeling stuck, while Robbie answers with dreams of a better life. He is a criminal who loves, a thief who doesn’t want to be cruel. That ambiguity puts him almost on equal footing with Tom’s fragility.

The story sharpens when we learn that seven of the nine houses they’ve robbed belong to the Dark Hearts, a violent biker gang. This isn’t mere opportunism — it’s a collision course.

Meanwhile, Tom assembles his task force: Anthony Grasso (Fabien Frankel), from organized crime; Elizabeth “Lizzie” Stover (Allison Oliver), a bumbling state trooper who even lost the briefing email; and Aleah Clinton (Thuso Mbedu), a sharp homicide detective. They set up in an abandoned stash house, a makeshift base for their operation. Together, they bring some humanity into the gloom — Lizzie with her clumsy humor, Tom with his vodka-soaked melancholy, and Anthony and Aleah trying to impose structure on the chaos.

Robbie’s tenth job, however, goes wrong. He brings along a new recruit (Owen Teague), the break-in spirals into violence, and an armed visitor arrives mid-heist. Shots are fired, the recruit ends up dead, and suddenly, this is no longer a victimless crime spree. Then comes the moment that reframes everything: a boy, no older than eight, steps out of the basement. “Are you my dad’s friends?” he asks. Robbie, a father himself, can’t hurt the child — but when he takes the boy away, even if only to bring him back later, the crime escalates into kidnapping. What began as stolen drug money is now a full-blown federal case, one that grips the entire community.

The pilot ends with the table set: Tom and Robbie, both shattered men, both in search of redemption in opposite ways. One drowns in grief and guilt, the other rationalizes crime as a means of survival. They are destined to collide — but no one walks away from this story clean.

And there is a reason Ingelsby always returns to this geography. Philadelphia and its surrounding towns are not just settings in his work — they are characters in their own right. It’s where he was born and raised, and it supplies the authenticity that defines his storytelling: the cadences of speech, the cultural textures, the barrooms and empty fields. The region provides him with a canvas of contrasts, where hope and decay coexist, and where he can write about ordinary lives — workers, cops, lost youth, shattered families — brushing up against the American promise. It is, for him, the perfect ground to explore faith, guilt, masculinity, and survival.

With its first episode, Task makes clear it isn’t trying to reinvent the crime genre, but to humanize it. It’s not about the novelty of the crimes, but about the weight of the people behind them. It’s about how an FBI task force, a garbage crew, and a fractured family can all reflect the same broken social landscape. Ingelsby once again proves why Mare of Easttown struck such a chord: he gives us characters who feel like real people, speaking like real people, caught in dramas that linger long after the credits roll.