Brad Ingelsby

Brad Ingelsby's best scene is a kitchen. In Mare of Easttown (2021), Kate Winslet's detective and Jean Smart's mother bicker across the table, the older woman with her wine and her games on the tablet, and nothing in the murder plot is as alive as the two of them being rude to each other. That is the scene Ingelsby writes best: two people who have known each other too long, in a house slightly too small for them, saying the thing they always say. We laughed at those two more than at anything else in the series, and it was because the insults had clearly been rehearsed over years.

He came to television from films. Out of the Furnace (2013) and Run All Night (2015) put family and crime in the same room; The Way Back (2020) did something similar with a coach and a second chance. Mare made his name, and Task (2025) went back to the same corner of Pennsylvania, with Mark Ruffalo as an FBI agent and Tom Pelphrey as the robber he is after, each given a home life that matters as much as the pursuit. Ingelsby has said, "I always start with characters. Then I try to find an excuse to tell a story with those characters in it." You can see it. The excuse is nearly always a crime, and the crime is nearly always the weakest thing on screen.

What works is the town. Around Winslet he built a place rather than a cast: Julianne Nicholson as a friend who is fine until she is not, Evan Peters as the eager young detective Mare cannot bully, Angourie Rice carrying a grief the series takes its time to explain. Craig Zobel directed all seven episodes and let the portrait of a worn-down woman and a worn-down place win over the whodunit. In Task, Ruffalo and Pelphrey do the same job, and the programme needs both men to matter before it can generate any suspense at all.

What does not work is the machinery, and the weather. Each man in Easttown gets his episode as the suspect and is then put back in the drawer; in the middle the investigation stalls and Ingelsby reaches for something bigger and less believable than anything around it, and we were bored, then annoyed at being bored by a series that had earned our patience. Task has the opposite trouble: the people are right, but the chase takes too long to gather pace, and Ingelsby keeps returning to the same low mood after his actors have already made the point. Grief, faith and forgiveness are his subjects and he trusts them completely. He does not trust a joke in the same way, and Task needed several.

The next one will be set near the last two, and it will have a body in the first hour. We would happily watch the version without the body.