Two good men confront the Task of forgiveness

CRIME DRAMAS, IN OUR DISTRACTED TIMES, TEND TO front-load said crimes. More often than not, there’s a murder within the first five minutes. This is only one of the genre’s many implicit rules that HBO’s Task breaks. The series from Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby opens with a montage of quotidian scenes from the lives of two men. Weary Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo) folds his hands in prayer, dunks his face in a sink full of ice water, downs Advil while driving. Rugged Robbie Prendergrast (Tom Pelphrey) carries his sleeping son to bed, pours himself a tall mug of coffee, perks up at a radio ad for a dating app.

- BY JUDY BERMAN

These tender parallel portraits introduce the characters whose analogous circumstances and divergent choices are, more than any murder or mystery, the show’s central subject. Like Mare, but slightly more elegant in its plotting, Task uses the detective-story format and the specificity of its rural Pennsylvania setting to explore elemental human problems. Whereas the former revealed the many ways in which the responsibility for keeping families and communities together falls on women (an observation that informs the new series as well), Ingelsby’s latest makes an astute study of guilt, revenge, and forgiveness.

Task’s dual protagonists fall on opposite sides of the law. Still hurting a year after his wife left him and their two kids, Robbie works in sanitation with his best friend, Cliff (Raúl Castillo). Recently, they’ve been meeting up at night with a third friend to rob trap houses. The men disguise themselves from targets who might recognize them, mostly members of a biker gang called the Dark Hearts, with Halloween masks; they brandish guns but avoid violence. As far as felonies go, the bloodless armed robbery of drug dealers ranks low on the moral-outrage scale—until a victim catches a glimpse of one assailant’s face. Then, suddenly, Robbie and his boys are murderers.