Is Task Related to Mare of Easttown?

HBO’s crime drama miniseries, ‘Task,’ stars Mark Ruffalo as Tom Brandis, an FBI agent who is put in charge of a task force to apprehend the culprits behind several home invasions and robberies in Delaware County. Apart from focusing on the criminal aspect of the story, the show also delves into the personal relationships and focuses on how their psyche informs their actions. A similar tone approach was used in another HBO crime miniseries, titled ‘Mare of Easttown.’ With both the show created by Brad Ingelsby and taking place in the Philadelphia suburbs, one can’t help but wonder if they are connected to each other.

The Connection Between Mare of Easttown and Task is Limited to Their Location

In the first episode of ‘Task,’ Tom Brandis sets up his table at a job fair where different government agencies try to get recruits for their programs. While Tom represents the FBI, there is another stall, not far from him. This stall represents the Easttown Police Department, which is a clear reference to ‘Mare of Easttown.’ This, however, does not mean that we are going to see Kate Winslet’s Mare Sheehan join Tom’s team to track down the robbers. This is an easter egg dropped by Brad Ingelsby, who is the creative force behind both shows. All this reference does is establish the fact that both shows take place in the same universe. Other than that, there is no plot point or character connecting them.

The creators of ‘Task’ have confirmed that both shows take place in and around Philadelphia and share the same DNA, but they remain wildly different stories. ‘Mare of Easttown’ was conceived as a whodunit that focuses more on the investigation and the suspense of finding the real culprit. ‘Task,’ on the other hand, gives the audience the cops and the criminals, and puts them on a collision course, which sets the tone of the story. ‘Task’ was created in the image of something like Michael Mann’s ‘Heat,’ with the thrill of the chase driving it into an action-filled scenario, which remains missing from ‘Mare of Easttown.’ Brad Ingelsby revealed that following the success of ‘Mare of Easttown,’ he wanted to get into another crime story, and for that, he decided to stay within the confines of Delaware County because that’s the place he knows best.

He was born and brought up there, and he has more often than not drawn upon it to infuse his stories with a sense of realism. For ‘Task,’ he returned to the same place and gave it the elements that made ‘Mare of Easttown’ so relatable to the audience. Both shows focus on protagonists driven by a sense of duty towards their family while experiencing a personal and moral crisis. More importantly, these are the stories of working-class people whose struggles reflect those experienced by real people. Ingelsby hoped that in both shows, the audience would see a reflection of themselves, be it because of the everydayness of the challenges faced by the characters or the fact that, at their heart, these stories are about families and the complicated nature of relationships. This thematic thread puts ‘Mare of Easttown’ and ‘Task’ in the same box, but when it comes to the plot, the stories don’t overlap with each other, and both series remain self-contained.

Read More: Is Mare of Easttown Based on a True Story?