There's nothing quite like a Philadelphia sports fan. (I would know—I'm from the area myself.) I forget who originally made the joke (though you're welcome to credit me from here on out) but the gist is that Philly fans react the same way regardless of whether the team wins or loses. When the Eagles played in the Super Bowl in 2024, fans mobbed the streets, pulled down traffic poles, and set a huge fire in the intersection of 12th and Market. You wouldn't have guessed it, but the Eagles actually won that game.
I was in Philadelphia over the weekend witnessing another chaotic scene from our passionate fans. The city basically shut down as everyone braced for the convergence of football, soccer, and playoff baseball in the same 48-hour span. Every building was painted Eagles green and Phillies red as if Christmas had arrived two months early, and every passing Philadelphian greeted each other with a cheery, "Go Birds!" It's the one month on the annual sports calendar—before anyone can count significant wins or loses—where it feels amazing to be a Philly fan. And yet, the highlight of the weekend was still Sunday night's episode of Task.
How Eagles fans felt about watching Saquon Barkley catch a toss from Jalen Hurts and then hurdle over a defender last season—that's how I feel about watching Mark Ruffalo and Tom Pelphrey act on screen together. And last night, the HBO crime drama hit a fever pitch with episode 5 when both actors finally appeared on screen together.
Let me set the scene. The limited series, set in the Delco area outside of Philadelphia, follows retired FBI agent and former priest Tom Brandis (Ruffalo) as he's called in to investigate a string of armed robberies. We later learn that the culprit is a trash collector named Robbie (Pelphrey). He's only targeting drug houses operated by the biker gang that killed his brother, and he justifies the hits as retribution for what they owe his family. So, as the bikers step into the series as the new main antagonists, Robbie fights to make a better life for his niece and daughter and earns more sympathy from the audience with each passing episode. Then, when Robbie finally comes face-to-face with the law in episode 5, you hope that Ruffalo's FBI agent can convince him to see a way out.
There's a beautiful yet tense scene in the episode. Robbie sits in the backseat of his car as he forces Tom to drive him around at gunpoint. He ponders his potential death, questions Tom about his beliefs of an afterlife, and delivers it all with the most perfect Delco accent I've heard on TV since Mare of Easttown. In a touching metaphor, the bird-watching fed compares Robbie to a rare tanager that has simply flown too far from its seasonal route. "It's called a vagrant," Ruffalo's character tells Robbie. "Most of them don't survive." Still, it's never too late to try. In this very moment, there's nothing I wanted more than to see this complicated and conflicted character try to find a way back to his family. Robbie replies, "Even if I wanted to go home, I don't know the way no more." Heartbreaking.
I mentioned Mare of Easttown above, because Task is written and created by the same scribe, Brad Ingelsby. If you don't know him from his award-winning HBO drama with Kate Winslet, maybe you've seen his work in the underrated 2020 film The Way Back—which stars Ben Affleck as a construction worker turned high school basketball coach. He also lives in Delco, and he thrives with stories about the people who call the Greater Philadelphia Area home. But even if Ingelsby's work is entirely new to you, what's clear about his writing is that he's captured something honest and real in his gritty stories of the American working class.
"When I'm writing characters and stories [I ask myself], What are the access points that people have?" Ingelsby told Esquire ahead of episode 5. "Task is really about families. It's about Tom and his daughter. It's about Robbie and his kids. Yeah, there's action and tense sequences. But what are the emotional access points? … It's: I know what it's like to live in a family and have an issue with my daughter. Not that I always hit the mark, but I try to put enough relationship stuff in a show that people who aren't in Delco—who don't know this world, who don't really care about the little details—can still access it."
So, when Robbie and Tom end the episode with their guns drawn at one another before the credits roll, you can't help but feel that everything you saw was one of the best episodes of TV this year. The cliff-hanger, with Tom and Robbie locked in a standoff? Just icing on the cake.
"I've always felt like this episode is really the symphony where everyone's operating at the peak of their powers," says Ingelsby. "The worlds are colliding and intersecting in ways that are intense, scary, and thrilling. This episode has always been the one where I hope audiences watch it and go, Holy shit. This is about to explode."
You can read the full interview with Ingelsby here. He talks to senior entertainment editor Brady Langmann about his relationship with faith, his new film The Lost Bus with Matthew McConaughey, and what he's most excited for audiences to see next week on Task.
After such a masterpiece of an episode, I know it's going to be brilliant.
No comments:
Post a Comment