TASK is NOT Mare of Easttown Season 2

samhexum · November 12, 2024

Mare of Easttown‘s creator is returning to HBO… but he’s not bringing Kate Winslet with him this time.

Brad Ingelsby, who wrote and created the Emmy-winning Mare, is back with a new Pennsylvania-set crime drama, Task, airing next year on HBO and starring Mark Ruffalo as a veteran FBI agent leading a task force that investigates a heist gone wrong. But since Mare was so popular and acclaimed, why didn’t he just make a Season 2?

“We talked about” doing a second season of Mare, Ingelsby told reporters at an HBO event on Tuesday, but “Mare’s journey in that show was so emotional… I always like to tell stories that are really emotional, and it’s hard to come up with an emotional story that could compete with losing a son and having to confront that.”

But then he came up with the idea for Task, “and it felt like it lives in the same world as Mare. It’s in the same part of that world, but it’s a much different story. And I was kind of, at that time, more interested in doing something different and new that can also speak to the same type of world that Marelived in.” (He added that Task’s story was never considered as a potential Season 2 of Mare.)

Ingelsby isn’t completely shutting the door on more Mare down the road, though. He’s “always open to revisiting Mare” down the line “if we could craft a story as compelling as the first one.”

Mare was billed as a limited series when it debuted in 2021, but it was a big hit and scored four Emmy wins, which naturally led to speculation about a possible Season 2. “If we can crack a story that is as great [as Season 1] and that would do justice to the characters and carry on the story in a way that was organic and yet surprising, I would love to do it,” Ingelsby told TVLine at the time. “I just don’t know what the story is. That’s the issue right now.”

Along with Ruffalo, Task’s cast includes Tom Pelphrey (Ozark), Raúl Castillo (Looking), Emilia Jones (Locke & Key), Alison Oliver (Conversations With Friends), Fabien Frankel (House of the Dragon), Thuso Mbedu (The Underground Railroad) and Martha Plimpton (Raising Hope).

samhexum · May 15

Mark Ruffalo is taking criminals to task this fall on HBO.

The network on Thursday released the first trailer for Task, the forthcoming drama created by Brad Ingelsby (Mare of Easttown), which premieres in September.

The series is “set in the working class suburbs of Philadelphia,” where Tom (Ruffalo), an FBI agent, “heads a task force to put an end to a string of violent robberies led by an unsuspecting family man (Ozark’s Tom Pelphrey),” according to the official logline.

Edited May 15 by samhexum
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