We’re kicking off something new at Tell Me About Your Father headquarters: a weekly recap series of HBO’s latest Sunday night prestige crime saga, Task. One: it features lonely single dads with oceans of pain roiling within. (Sign us up, girl!) Two: we’ve never recapped a show as it airs and you can look forward to insights from us such as “one of the main characters is a robber and his name is Robbie,” and three: when we don’t have a Sunday-night show, we have nothing.
Task stars Mark Ruffalo as a grieving ex-priest–turned–FBI agent dad with a drinking problem, and Tom Pelphrey as a garbage-man-turned-robber whose wife split and left him with two kids and a 21-year-old niece who’s become their de facto caretaker. She’s mad about it! It’s writer-director Brad Ingelsby’s second HBO series, following his excellent 2021 Delco noir hit Mare of Easttown, which earned Emmy Awards for stars Kate Winslet, Evan Peters, and Julianne Nicholson.
We’re not going to let the middling early reviews of Task pour cold wooder on our hopes that this show will deliver the same wrenching look as Mare did at family dysfunction and addiction as the great equalizer. Deliver us from the S-day scaries, Ruffalo!
Our first recap episode is out everywhere you normally find TMAYF. Starting next week, though, the recaps will live on our Substack and all you have to do to hear them is hit “subscribe.” It’s free, so you can save your money for Rita’s.
We’ll drop a new recap every week after the Sunday episode airs, so you’ve got time to watch before we spoil it.
See you again next week!
Elizabeth, Matt and Erin
