In the rust-belt shadows of suburban Philadelphia, where strip malls bleed into backwoods and the Delaware River whispers forgotten sins, HBO unleashes a crime saga that claws at the soul like a confessional in a blackout. Premiering to rapturous acclaim on September 7, 2025, Task—the seven-episode miniseries from Mare of Easttown auteur Brad Ingelsby—marks a ferocious pivot for the prestige procedural, blending the intimate grit of small-town rot with the sprawling dread of institutional betrayal. At its bruised heart beats Mark Ruffalo, the everyman empath of Spotlight and The Kids Are All Right, now a shattered ex-priest turned FBI operative whose badge can’t exorcise his inner ghouls. Inspired by the labyrinthine saga of real-life informant Rev. Patrick J. Wall—a former priest who flipped for the feds in the early 2000s, exposing a web of clerical cover-ups that still echoes in FBI vaults—Task fictionalizes a cold case that refuses to thaw: a string of ritualistic murders tied to a rogue Catholic faction, unsolved for decades and festering like an untreated wound. Ruffalo’s Tom Brandis isn’t just hunting killers; he’s wrestling the collar he once wore, his crisis of faith a mirror to America’s reckoning with power’s predators. Critics hail it as “more tense than Mare of Easttown on steroids,” with a 95% Rotten Tomatoes score underscoring its vise-grip hold. In an autumn TV landscape starved for substance, Task doesn’t just thrill—it indicts, forcing viewers to confront the demons we deputize to chase ours. As Ingelsby puts it in the pilot’s voiceover, scrawled across rain-smeared windshields: “He was sent to catch a killer. He ended up chasing his own demons.” And oh, what a chase it is—one that leaves scars deeper than any case file.
The series’ alchemy brews from Ingelsby’s Delco DNA, that Delaware County alchemy of Wawa runs, scrapple breakfasts, and Rita’s Water Ice as confetti for the damned. Shot on location amid Philly’s frayed fringes—crumbling rowhouses in Chester, fog-choked trails along the Schuylkill—Task clocks a lean $80 million budget, funneling every dime into atmospheric immersion: handheld cams that jitter like a junkie’s twitch, sound design layering Catholic hymns with the crunch of autumn leaves under fleeing boots. Development ignited in 2022, when Ingelsby, fresh off Mare‘s Emmy sweep, unearthed Wall’s memoir A Wounded Shepherd, weaving its threads into a narrative that probes the FBI’s infamous “priest files”—declassified docs from a 1990s probe into clerical abuse rings that implicated over 4,000 offenders, yet yielded few convictions due to Vatican stonewalling. HBO greenlit swiftly, casting Ruffalo after Michael Keaton bowed out for Knox Goes Away, envisioning a vehicle that humanizes the informant archetype: not a whistleblower saint, but a flawed vessel cracked by complicity. Executive produced by Ruffalo himself, alongside Ingelsby and The Wire‘s Ed Burns, Task unfolds weekly on Sundays, each installment a pressure-cooked hour that escalates from procedural peel-back to existential freefall. Early episodes tease the cold case’s allure—a 1987 altar-boy slaying in a derelict chapel, ritual dagger left as sacrament—while later ones plunge into the personal inferno, Ruffalo’s Brandis unraveling amid stakeouts and sacraments. It’s no coincidence the tagline evokes Mare: Both dissect Pennsylvania’s parochial prisons, but Task amps the stakes, trading Kate Winslet’s maternal maelstrom for a paternal purgatory where faith isn’t solace—it’s suspect.
The Content: A Relentless Unraveling of Faith, Family, and the Feds’ Forgotten Files
Task opens in medias res, a masterstroke of Ingelsby’s taut economy: Episode 1 catapults us into a rain-lashed midnight raid on a Delco trap house, where Brandis—collar unbuttoned, rosary dangling like a noose—leads a ragtag task force through booby-trapped basements reeking of fentanyl and regret. The target? A low-level priest-turned-pusher, Father Elias Crowe (Isaach de Bankolé in volcanic form), whose confessional booth doubles as a drop point for a syndicate peddling “holy highs” to fund off-books exorcisms. Brandis, yanked from bereavement leave after his wife’s overdose six months prior, is the bureau’s reluctant resurrection: a lapsed cleric with a psych eval thicker than his Bible, tasked with infiltrating the “Sacred Veil,” a clandestine Catholic offshoot shielding abusers since the ’80s. Drawing from Wall’s playbook—his real flip in 2002, trading vows for wire-worn confessions—Brandis poses as a prodigal son seeking absolution, his cover greased by old seminary ties. But the cold case isn’t backdrop; it’s the beast: The 1987 murder of young altar boy Tommy Reilly, throat slit mid-Mass in a Philly suburb chapel, the killer’s modus operandi—carved Latin runes invoking “purgatio peccatorum” (purging of sins)—mirroring a string of unsolved hits that the FBI shelved amid Vatican pressure.
As the task force assembles in a fluorescent-lit war room—clipboards yielding to laptops scraping encrypted diocesan servers—the series dissects the machinery of mistrust. Brandis clashes with his team: the hotheaded profiler Anthony Grasso (Fabien Frankel, all coiled menace), a Quantico golden boy skeptical of “God-boy’s” gut instincts; the empathetic analyst Lena Voss (Thuso Mbedu, her quiet fury a scalpel), a survivor of clerical grooming who decodes runes with the precision of a cryptographer; and the grizzled handler Sheriff Michael Dorsey (Raphael Sbarge), whose Delco drawl hides a ledger of buried badges. Episodes pulse with procedural poetry: stakeouts in confessional vans wired for whispers, interrogations where Brandis trades scripture for slip-ups, his priestly patter (“Absolve thy sins, or the state will collect”) cracking suspects like stained-glass panes. Mid-season, the plot thickens into transnational terror: The Veil’s tendrils snake to Boston’s buried scandals and Rome’s red-robed enablers, Brandis jetting to Vatican archives under diplomatic cover, his rosary beads clinking against a Beretta. Ingelsby’s script, laced with Delco dialect (“youse guys” as both endearment and epithet), grounds the global in the granular—Wawa coffee fueling all-nighters, family dinners devolving into doctrinal dust-ups. Themes of redemption’s razor edge dominate: Brandis’s demons aren’t abstract; they’re visceral, flashbacks to his altar-boy youth revealing a mentor’s predatory touch that propelled his defrocking. Yet Task transcends cop-show tropes, evolving into a requiem for the repressed—exploring how faith’s firewall enables felony, and how the FBI’s “task forces” often task the truth with expediency. By finale’s threshold, the cold case isn’t solved; it’s metastasized, Brandis’s pursuit a pilgrimage where every clue unearths not justice, but the jihad within.
The Plot Twists: Confessions That Cut Deeper Than Any Dagger – Revelations Rending the Veil
Ingelsby, a wizard of narrative gut-punches honed on Mare‘s maternal minefields, loads Task with twists that function like laced sacraments—deceptively divine until they damn. The series thrives on subversion, flipping the informant thriller’s playbook: No lone-wolf heroics, but a cascade of betrayals that indict the institution from pulpit to precinct. Episode 2’s opener feints familiarity: A raid nets Father Crowe, his confessional tapes spilling names tied to the Reilly murder—only for the “smoking censer” to evaporate in a Vatican-hacked server wipe, revealing the task force’s own mole. Suspicions ricochet: Is it Grasso, whose gambling debts scream setup? Voss, whose survivor scars might fuel vigilante vengeance? The reveal stings in Episode 4’s confessional climax: Lena Voss, the team’s moral compass, is the leak—not for cash, but catharsis. Groomed by a Veil priest in her Johannesburg youth, she feeds intel to a rogue faction seeking internal purge, her “betrayal” a twisted bid for closure. Mbedu’s unmasking, lit by candle-flicker in a derelict chapel, is a tour de force: tears carving rivers down her face as she whispers, “I didn’t join the hunt, Tom—I became the hounds.” This pivot reframes the cold case not as relic, but reckoning, Voss’s files unlocking a 1992 follow-up slaying Brandis’s own seminary overlooked.
The mid-season maelstrom erupts in Episode 5, a bottle-episode blizzard trapping the team in a Delco safehouse: As winds howl like damned souls, Brandis deciphers Reilly’s runes, unearthing a familial phantom—the boy’s killer wasn’t Veil zealot, but Brandis’s estranged brother, Father Sean (Jamie McShane), a “reformed” cleric Brandis shielded in their youth to preserve family cloth. Ruffalo’s confrontation, fists clenched around a crucifix, shatters the screen: “You wore the collar to choke the truth, Sean—not save it.” This blood-bond bombshell cascades into institutional implosion, the FBI’s cold case archives exposed as Vatican-vetted forgeries, shelving hits to safeguard diplomatic detente. Episode 6 piles heresy on heresy: Sheriff Dorsey, the avuncular anchor, orchestrated the original cover-up—his daughter’s Veil entanglement forcing a badge-blind pact, the “task” force his penance play. Sbarge’s unspooling, a bourbon-fueled breakdown in a Schuylkill boathouse, flips loyalty into liability, his plea—”Protecting one sin to forgive a thousand”—a microcosm of the series’ soul-search. The finale reserves Armageddon: The Veil’s architect? Not a rogue cardinal, but a collective phantom—a rotating cabal of feds and faithful where Brandis himself, in a blackout from grief-fueled pills, officiated a “purging” ritual post-wife’s death, his blackouts burying complicity. A post-credits Polaroid—young Tom absolving a shadowed acolyte—teases renewal: The cold case cracks, but unleashes a hotter hell, Brandis’s demons not chased, but unchained. These contortions aren’t contrivances; they’re crucibles, forging tension tauter than Mare‘s maternal noose, each twist a theological thunderbolt that leaves faith—and viewers—forever fractured.
The Cast: Ruffalo’s Raw Revelation Anchors a Troupe of Tormented Titans
Task boasts a casting coup that feels divinely ordained, each player a vessel for Ingelsby’s Delco purgatory, blending marquee muscle with marginalized might to humanize the horror. Mark Ruffalo, 57, anchors as Tom Brandis, his post-She-Hulk pivot a career-defining gut-wrench: Gone is the affable Hulk, replaced by a hollowed husk whose eyes—rimmed red from sleepless vigils—betray a soul bartered for badges. Ruffalo, drawing from Wall’s wardrobe of wired collars, inhabits Brandis with monkish minimalism: fidgety rosary-twirls masking seismic shakes, his Philly growl cracking on confessionals that double as therapy. Post-Poor Things‘ whimsy, this is Ruffalo unplugged—vulnerable, volatile, his Episode 3 breakdown (sobbing over Reilly’s rune-etched chalice) a masterclass in muted mania that snagged early Emmy whispers. “Tom’s not hunting demons,” Ruffalo mused on set. “He’s hosting them.” Opposite him looms Tom Pelphrey, 43, as Robbie Kane, the trash-hauling everyman whose side-gig as a drug-den documentarian spirals into reluctant informant—a Banshee brute reborn as blue-collar bard. Pelphrey upstages with feral empathy: bedtime dragon tales for his tykes contrasting heist-night howls, his Delco twang (“Yer honor’s just another word for ‘owe ya'”) a dialect dagger. Fresh off Ozark‘s scene-stealing villainy, Pelphrey’s Robbie is Task‘s emotional engine, his warehouse rumble with Brandis a powder-keg pas de deux that eclipses the leads.
The ensemble elevates the ensemble: Alison Oliver, 29 (Saltburn‘s feral ingenue), simmers as Agent Sarah Hale, Brandis’s sharp-tongued protégé whose Quantico polish frays into Philly paranoia, her arc from skeptic to scarred sister a revelation of quiet command. Thuso Mbedu, 33 (The Underground Railroad‘s luminous survivor), ignites as Lena Voss, her Johannesburg lilt infusing the analyst with otherworldly insight—code-breaking sessions laced with ancestral proverbs that ground the gothic in grit. Fabien Frankel, 30 (House of the Dragon‘s princeling), coils as Anthony Grasso, the profiler whose Ivy swagger snaps under street scrutiny, his mid-season meltdown a Molotov of machismo. Raúl Castillo (Looking) grounds as Eddie Ruiz, the task force’s ethical everyman—a Delco dad moonlighting as mole-hunter—his barstool soliloquies on fatherhood’s failures echoing Brandis’s void. Jamie McShane (Sons of Anarchy) broods as Father Sean, Ruffalo’s spectral sibling, his cassock a cloak of quiet carnage; Sam Keeley (The Last Kingdom) flashes as young Reilly’s avenging kin; and Emilia Jones (CodA) tugs heartstrings as Brandis’s estranged daughter, her bike-fleeing cameos a poignant puncture. Veterans like Isaach de Bankolé (as the serpentine Father Crowe) and Michael Maize (as trap-house enforcer Deric Nance) add ecclesiastical edge, their monologues—de Bankolé’s venomous vespers in a vapor-lit vestry—stealing scenes like sanctified thieves. This troupe isn’t star-stuffed; it’s symbiotically scarred, their off-screen Delco barbecues forging on-screen frays that feel familial, not fabricated. In Task, the cast doesn’t perform—they possess, each soul a station of the cross in a Calvary of crime.
As October’s chill grips HBO’s airwaves, Task endures not as episodic escape, but existential excavation—a cold case thawed to scald the living. Ruffalo’s Brandis, sent to snare a slayer, snares us instead, his demon-dance a dirge for the devout and the damned. More tense than Mare‘s maternal maze? Undeniably, with twists that twist the knife and a cast that carves the bone. In the end, Task isn’t about solving the unsolvable; it’s about surviving the summons, a clarion call from Philly’s fringes that some shadows are cast by the light we fear most. Stream it, confess it, but beware: Once the task begins, the demons don’t clock out.
