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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
27
Mixed:
7
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Sep 5, 2025
Season 1 Review:
A master class. .... Pelphrey, his eyes staring into nothingness, and Ruffalo, his shoulders hunched beneath the weight of the world, are outstanding, as are the supporting players, embodying gritty souls caught up in unforgiving machinations — until there is, somehow, some forgiveness. Ingelsby understands that the extremes of the crime genre provide the perfect basis for searing human drama, provided they’re handled with skill and conviction. “Task” has more than enough of both.
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IndieWireSep 4, 2025
Screen RantSep 5, 2025
Season 1 Review:
Every last frame becomes naturally compelling and leaves viewers wanting more after seven episodes. Task proves that the HBO + Ingelsby formula is one of modern television's safest bets. It's hands down the best drama series of the 2026 Emmy pool and a can't-miss show this September.
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Aug 28, 2025
Season 1 Review:
The performances, consistently lived-in and assembled by casting director Avy Kaufman, are what weave the many threads into a tapestry. .... Like “Mare” before it, “Task” can be unrelentingly grim, and the shifts in perspective — if not tone — offer something of a reprieve as the walls close in on all the characters.
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Aug 28, 2025
Aug 28, 2025
Season 1 Review:
As strong as it is as a crime thriller, it's even better as a study of the lives at its core, thanks to remarkable work from Ruffalo and Pelphrey. Both bring sensitivity and tenderness to characters whose circumstance would make it easy for them to surrender to hardness and despair.
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Sep 8, 2025
Season 1 Review:
Where Mare Of Easttown was a show about motherhood, repression, and redemption, Task seems interested in fatherhood, faith, and grief. Those are slightly more common themes for the crime-drama genre. But this premiere suggests Ingelsby has a perspective (and a cast) that could make them feel fresh again.
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The TimesSep 8, 2025
Season 1 Review:
The plotting is serviceable, the pacing is glacial and the presence of two single fathers grappling with grief, guilt and fury means the doomy darkness can feel overwhelming. This could do with some of Mare’s warmth and levity (remember those fart jokes?), but the depth and texture of the drama are spellbinding.
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Sep 8, 2025
Season 1 Review:
“Task,” the latest from “Mare of Easttown” creator Brad Ingelsby, is simultaneously more disciplined and haphazard than its 2021 predecessor. The heist piece is straightforward, but at times the fallout distractingly jumbles the puzzle. Even so, the cast’s superb performances easily overcome those flaws to produce a story that’s more emotionally resonant and fulfilling.
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Sep 5, 2025
Season 1 Review:
“Task,” premiering Sunday on HBO, isn’t a sequel to “Mare,” but it is set in the same universe of rural, depressed Pennsylvania. And it’s a worthy follow-up, with a steady lead performance from Mark Ruffalo and several breakout turns from the sprawling supporting cast.
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Aug 28, 2025
Season 1 Review:
It’s a feedback loop of gloominess, that turns the process of watching early episodes feel like trying to walk up a muddy hill in the middle of a downpour. .... That said, just as Mare came together satisfyingly in the end, the last three episodes of Task are very strong as both suspense and character studies.
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ColliderAug 28, 2025
RogerEbert.comAug 28, 2025
Season 1 Review:
It may not produce the same fervor as “Mare” by virtue of not having a mystery waiting to be solved in the final episode, but it’s a reminder of how well HBO can do this kind of thing when a perfectly cast ensemble is invigorated by the craft and the writing around them.
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Sep 8, 2025
Season 1 Review:
The show wants to walk its characters through every station of the cross, but it too often strives for intensity and winds up merely glum. The schlubby, inward-looking torpidity of Ruffalo’s performance doesn’t help quicken the pulse. (It’s tempting to think what kind of electricity Michael Keaton, who was initially cast in the part, might have brought to it.) But Pelphrey brings a wounded soulfulness to his working-class striver,
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Sep 5, 2025
Aug 28, 2025
Season 1 Review:
Task’s suspense sequences, as in a home invasion and a protracted chase through a forest, are nothing short of gripping. But as the character-driven panorama that the series spends most of its time trying to be, Task focuses on all the wrong things, with broad traits used to sketch its characters, who are mostly saddled with quirky backstories.
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Aug 28, 2025
Season 1 Review:
That Task has no answers for the biggest existential questions it raises, about the purpose of suffering or what we’re meant to do with it, is no big sin. That makes it admirably ambitious and touchingly human. That the show gets so lost in the misery that it seems to forget why it went looking for it in the first place is the letdown.
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