Task Boss And Tom Pelphrey Break Down That Heartbreaking Premiere Reveal — Plus, Grade It!
Warning: This post contains spoilers for Sunday's Task premiere.
HBO's new crime drama Task got off to a fast start in Sunday's premiere — and then hit us with a gut-punch.
The premiere introduced us to two men on a collision course: veteran FBI agent Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo), who was assigned to lead a task force to stop a string of violent home robberies; and trash man Robbie (Tom Pelphrey), who's been pulling off those robberies with his buddies. While Tom assembled his task force, Robbie and his friends Cliff and Peaches went after a big score — and it went sideways, with three people ending up dead, including Peaches. But the real gut-punch came when Robbie realized there was a young boy asleep in the house they were robbing... and now both his parents are dead. Not knowing what else to do (and being a father himself), Robbie scooped the kid up and took him home with him.
"I think that was the best choice in a bunch of horrible choices," Pelphrey tells TVLine. "It's kind of an impossible decision. Robbie loves his own children so much, he's not gonna hurt the kid. But at the same time, if he just left him there, the kid's seen him and Cliff, so the story's gonna be over before it starts if he does that. So he's gotta take him."
Pelphrey adds that Robbie's choice to take Sam is "so telling of who he is," though it's "not surprising, given who I find Robbie to be, but kind of a beautiful surprise, in the storytelling sense of it."
Series creator Brad Ingelsby, who created Task as a follow-up to his previous HBO series Mare of Easttown, agrees that "there's a practical side to Robbie taking the kid... 'If the cops come and get him, he's going to be able to point us out.'" But there's a moral side to it, too, he notes: "I also think there's a code that Robbie has. He has his own personal code. He'll do certain things, but not others."
Plus, we've seen enough of Robbie at home with his own kids that we already know he has a soft side, Ingelsby says: "There's a tenderness about Robbie that we know he's not going to hurt the kid... I think Robbie is a guy with a kind heart, ultimately."
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