Task

What’s frustrating is that while Tom and Robbie’s dance of evasion and investigation gets more predictable, the series’ performances get richer, so Task teeter-totters on an imbalance of story and ensemble.

[Pelphrey's] frazzled and desperate performance outshines everything else in Ingelsby’s latest, and if it can’t compensate for the show’s shortcomings, it nonetheless makes it worth sticking with until (almost) the end.

In the end, “Task” is neither disaster nor triumph. It’s a competent crime drama elevated by its lead performances, but one that rarely rises above its formula. HBO has built its reputation on redefining the genre; here, it’s content to simply reheat it.

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.

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.