Task (HBO)

What bugs me a bit about the kind of biker gangs featured in Task, is that they are dealing in millions, but where exactly does all the money go, other than in corrupting the cops?  

Social mobility certainly doesn't seem to be their thing.

I almost passed on this show, partly because it was being led by Mark Ruffalo, currently a leading light of Hollywood's faux-righteous mob, but wisdom, he himself states during the finale's epilogue, is knowing what to overlook, so I am glad I overcame this qualm.

While there is some pent up passive aggressive sanctimoniousness in the character of Tom Brandis, he ends up being a likeable, if unlikely, Task-master, perhaps an American liberal fantasy of an FBI agent: a lapsed man of God, always steadfastly determined to do the right thing, even if it this occasionally blows up in his face. (In Tom's case, maybe a bit more than occasionally.)

This story seems to be an extended lecture about the dangers of testosterone-fuelled strategising, but it is undoubtedly the female characters who really stand out here, driving my own engagement with the narrative through the episodes, especially Maeve, Lizzie and Aleah. (Looking forward now to seeing Emilia Jones in Cat Person.)

None of these roles went to American actresses, so as with Mare of Easttown, the question of accents hangs in the air again. I can't really tell, at least not like a Pennsylvania native could, but I suspect that all the non-Yanks in the principal cast are generally coping better than American thesps would in an equivalent drama set somewhere in Britain with a marked regional accent even amongst the middle classes, like Liverpool, say.