Taking fathers to 'Task'

The show creator and co-stars reflect on the collision course that led to the finale of the HBO crime drama

- BY YVONNE VILLARREAL

BEXX FRANCOIS For The Times TOM Pelphrey, left, and Mark Ruffalo's characters "both get to navigate their own journeys of faith," says Brad Ingelsby, center.

Brad Ingelsby knew after the breakout success of HBO’s “Mare of Easttown” — a crime drama about a police detective (Kate Winslet) investigating the murder of a teenage girl in a fictional working-class town — he didn't want his next series to be another whodunit.

“That's Mare’s thing,” he says on a recent late afternoon. “So, you start to go, if you're going to write another story in the crime genre, what would get the audience to keep clicking to the next episode? I just thought, ‘Well, maybe a collision course show, where [in] every episode, we get a little closer, a little closer, a little closer, until things collide.’”

In “Task,” which concluded Sunday on HBO, Mark Ruffalo stars as Tom Brandis, a priest-turned-FBI agent leading a task force investigating a series of robberies in Delaware County, Pa., an area commonly referred to as Delco that was also the setting for “Mare of Easttown.” (And with references to Wawa and Scrapple, along with visits to Rita’s Water Ice, it slips into its role of expanding the universe.) It leads Tom to Robbie Prendergast (Tom Pelphrey), a sanitation worker who robs drug houses at night to provide for his family. Both men are emotionally tortured by life events — Tom's wife was murdered by their adopted son, who is incarcerated; Robbie's brother was killed by a member of a motorcycle gang — that have set them each on different, but destructive paths.