Task Review

Brad Ingelsby, who made Mare of Easttown, returns to the Delaware County suburbs with a story in two halves. Mark Ruffalo's Tom Brandis is an FBI agent and former Catholic priest, back on duty after a family tragedy and put in charge of a small task force; Tom Pelphrey's Robbie Prendergrast is a sanitation worker robbing the stash houses of the Dark Hearts motorcycle gang while his niece Maeve raises his children. The seven episodes cut between hunter and hunted until the two stories meet.

Pelphrey won the Emmy for supporting actor, and he makes Robbie's recklessness and his love for his children equally real. Ruffalo, heavy and quiet, plays a man running on grief and duty, and Emilia Jones, Thuso Mbedu and Martha Plimpton give the supporting parts weight. Alex Disenhof's photography of trash routes and cluttered kitchens, nominated for an Emmy, finds a bleak beauty in ordinary places.

It is relentlessly bleak, the opening episode is baggy, and the plotting has holes that critics noticed. But Ingelsby cares less about the case than about fathers, faith and forgiveness, and the finale's gentle landing earns the pain before it. HBO has renewed it, with Ruffalo returning.