Review of "Task"

Love and Death

Task concluded its seven-episode first season on HBO Max earlier this week -- and I hope it is the first of more than one season, because the series is an unusual and ultimately winning combination of love and death.

I don’t mean only romantic love, though Task has some of that, too. But this series has a love of what is, for want of a better word, nature. Every episode has birds, feeding and chirping. Crucial characters swim and connect to something greater in lakes and ponds. There’s a lush greenery that comes from the Pennsylvania wild that I’m familiar with, because I’ve seen a lot of it in New York and Cape Cod.

But the show is an FBI story, and the FBI leading a joint task force in this story is looking into drugs and interstate murders, not white collar crimes. And death is meted out in all kinds of ways, usually in bullets. Any life, FBI or criminal, is possibly forfeit at any time. But even in crime and its policing, there is a tempering element. The lead person in the narrative, agent Tom Brandis (perfectly played by Mark Ruffalo), used to be a priest. He’s experienced death in both his personal and two professional lives, priest and agent. His ultimate problem is not to identify and bring to justice the criminals he pursues, but how to forgive. Indeed, forgiveness is such an underlying, undulating presence in Task, Don Henley’s “Heart of the Matter” could easily have been its theme song.

Brandis’s counterpart is a criminal with many lovable aspects. Robbie (perfectly played by another Tom -- Tom Pelphrey) is in effect a mirror-image of Tom Brandis, a spiritual brother on the other side of the law. The two even look somewhat alike. Both are highly intelligent and empathetic, and put out everything to protect those around them, to the best of their flawed abilities.

And just about everyone in this story needs protection, because death is always close and at hand. Sometimes its killingly cold clutch is predictable, sometimes it’s a gut-punching surprise. Loose ends abound. Most but not all are resolved in the end.

Hence my hope for a second season. The birds are still chirping. Nature never dies.