Task: Superheroic faith in a world that takes away the will to live

It seems like yesterday, but it's been over 11 years since True Detective premiered. Its first season was so impactful that it weighed down the next two, which were considered, in order of arrival, a laughingstock and nothing. Finally, last year, with Polar Night , its fourth and rather rebooted installment, the series regained some of its prestige. With its combination of hyper-realistic grime and facile mysticism, True Detective always walked the edge of the ridiculous. And of course, when you do that, it's only natural to shy away. All the emulators of Nic Pizzolatto and Cary Joji Fukunaga's series were cut short. When Mare of Easttown premiered in 2021, comparisons with True Detective were automatically defused: Brad Ingelsby's series could only relate to Pizzolatto and Fukunaga's through hyper-realistic grime. But how else could a detective story set in the less glamorous part of North America be made? Mare of Easttown , starring an imperial Kate Winslet, also swept the board and also made things difficult for itself in its next season. Brad Ingelsby is playing a game of misdirection with this potential new installment of the series. Task , his new series, isn't one. Or maybe it is. Because Mare of Easttown and Task don't just share the same creator and hyper-realistic filth.

The first episode of Task , which arrives this week on HBO Max, lays out the pieces of the game that will unfold throughout its seven episodes: some small-time criminals, a police officer with a dislocated family, a robbery gone wrong, and a child. Broadly speaking, that's the bleak picture presented by Brad Ingelsby's new series. The narrative tone the screenwriter uses is, to no one's surprise, downright depressing. Ingelsby also once again resorts to a common idea-concept in this type of fiction and, nevertheless, always effective: the tainted childhood. Few things are more devastating than a child alone in the world, a child who has seen too much, a child whom no one has truly loved . That child is in Task .

One of the transcendent questions the series poses is whether that child is salvageable. Because maybe not, and even if he, innocent, doesn't know it, he's already the next link in a chain woven of crime, abandonment, and misery. In Task , Mark Ruffalo is an FBI agent in charge of the case involving that child, a convoluted and sordid affair that, moreover, takes place neither in sophisticated New York nor in sunny Miami, but in the anonymous, seedy, and seemingly infinite suburban territory that is the least photogenic United States. That rural but far from bucolic setting is one of the most fertile grounds for narratives about the destruction (if it ever existed) of the American dream . In the land of disturbing gas stations, soulless malls , and ugly coats, series and films have recently been developed that show us the worst of humanity. Almost none of them bet on the transcendence, however dark and abysmal, of True Detective , because almost none of them needed it. Just being a pessimistic-realist, Task already has enough of an abyss. Its first episode paints a grim picture of doomed characters and impossible redemptions. And yet Brad Ingelsby never stops believing in humanity. His is an almost superheroic faith in a world (the real one and the one he depicts in his series) that takes away one's will to live. But one must live. One must believe that the child has a future. If we lose that, we lose everything.