A pitch-black crime drama owing not only to its dark subject matter, but also to the hush-hush hours of the night during which so much of the violence takes place. A gang of Halloween-masked thieves raid drug dealers' homes in the wee hours to steal their loot, and an FBI task force is sent out to catch them; when things go horribly wrong during one job--and a little boy who sees the bad guys with their masks off is kidnapped--the agents are suddenly facing more than they bargained for. Actually, the thieves themselves aren't the only baddies--after they're introduced in episode one, the very next installment gives us our first extended look at the biker gang that also wants in on the action. (And if the guys we see at the beginning seem bad, the bikers we meet one episode later make them look like choir boys.) The decision to portray the thieves almost (but not quite) as average Joes--at least at home--is interesting, and gives "Task" a family vibe it otherwise might have lacked. Their leader, for example, has in his care (albeit a tad reluctantly) a young niece and nephew, and their steel-jawed, fed-up older sister. Tom Pelphrey plays the character with a surprising amount of depth; clearly he's a man who--when he's not planning robberies and carrying them out--has it in his heart to be as good as he can be to the youngest ones, though less so, generally, to their sister. As the guy in charge of the task force, the excellent Mark Ruffalo--gray-haired, paunchy, and tired--doesn't appear to be capable of solving a series of dollar store robberies let alone something as big as this. (He also drinks a lot, largely because of some debilitating family problems of his own.) There's a kind of moral ambiguity here, too: what are we to make of the fact--if we're to make anything of it at all--that the home invaders aren't ripping off law abiding citizens, but users and dealers and thugs? Does that make them, at least at first, any less...evil? Moody and atmospheric, tense and suspenseful, "Task" has promise. I've only just started, and intend to go back for more. Check it out.
