This article contains spoilers for Task.

When Brad Ingelsby, creator of HBO’s 2021 hit crime drama Mare of Easttown, sat down to do his next series, he knew he wanted to return to the same place—Delaware County (Delco), Pennsylvania, abutting the southwest side of Philadelphia. But he had another, more contemplative type of crime story in mind. This is how Task, Ingelsby’s current HBO drama starring Mark Ruffalo and Tom Pelphrey, was born.

Mare had put Delco—and particularly the near-indescribable thick Delco accent that sounds as if the South had an Italian-American baby with Baltimore—on the map. But where Mare was a whodunnit unfolding in the context of one family’s generational maternal tensions, Task provides something of the opposite: an examination of paternal strife in a noir-esque crime show that tells you who’s doing the misdeeds from the jump. Here, we watch as FBI Agent Tom Brandis (Ruffalo) attempts to bring together a task force to catch a group of people robbing a local drug-slinging biker gang and leaving a trail of bodies behind. Hidden to Brandis but in full view for us is the face behind those robberies: a grieving and adrift single father of two, Robbie Prendergrast (Pelphrey), who works as a local refuse collector.

Though Task makes a meal of class disparities, violence, and the malaise of feeling “stuck” in a small hometown that suffocates you, the show is also steeped in ruminations on faith, remorse, and healing. Those more positive themes are felt the most strongly in the show’s final hour, the seventh episode, titled “A Still Small Voice.”

I, a Philly native, spoke with Ingelsby about the religion within Task, Tom Brandis’ final moments on screen, and why the showrunner keeps returning to the dark underbelly of the same place.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Slate: You’ve spoken about not necessarily wanting to make another whodunnit, à la Mare of Easttown. Instead, the way Task is structured is essentially a sort of tragic noir, where the viewer already knows who’s doing the crime. What drew you to this structure?

Brad Ingelsby: I think it started with the question of—how do you do a crime show that’s not a mystery that needs to be solved? What’s going to keep people clicking to the next episode? Because people come to these shows with genre expectations they want to have met, and hopefully subverted at times too. So it was more that I had an idea for two characters that I was interested in—one was Tom Brandis, the ex-priest who’s kind of lost his faith and is in the midst of a family crisis, and then the other one was a trash collector [Robbie], who has his own ideas of faith that are very different than Tom’s.

And then I ask myself, “Well, if these are the characters I want to explore, what’s the tension in the piece?” And it felt like a collision course was a way to do that, where each episode brings them a little bit closer, a little bit closer. And that would bring a different excitement and tension than Mare, which was kind of just a weekly guessing game, I think. If you like everybody, that’s its own kind of tension: Oh, I like everybody. I’m scared to see what’s going to happen when they collide. And so we leaned into that as the engine of the piece, which is literally the end of the fifth episode: Oh my God, they’re all here in the same place, at the same time. What’s going to happen?

Tom and Robbie are such great foils for each other. They’re both men who have experienced family tragedies and are struggling to parent their children in light of these tragedies. And they both, I think, are very similarly closed off from being honest about their pain, and are both questioning their concept of faith.

It was important to give Tom and Robbie some common ground so that when they do meet, you’re not traveling such a huge distance to get them to understand one another. When they got in the car together, when they have that journey together, it needed to be believable that they could come to some sort of, I don’t even know if it’s an understanding or an appreciation, but an acknowledgment that these guys don’t have to hate each other, that they don’t have to be adversaries. That, in fact, they have a lot in common. They’re both struggling to be good fathers while also understanding that their actions have caused tremendous pain to their children.

And so I felt like in order to get to that place where Robbie’s able to say to Tom [in Episode 5], Hey, you’re a decent man, just walk in those woods, man, and just go away, in a believable way, we couldn’t build from zero understanding up to a 100, but we could build from maybe 50 to 100.

In terms of humanity, let’s talk about Grasso (Fabien Frankel) for a second, because he has probably the biggest moments of the last few episodes. He’s been a federal informant for the bikers, but in the end he flips and nearly dies trying to protect Maeve (Emilia Jones) from Jayson (Sam Keeley). You could have easily made him someone who remains two-faced or “bad” throughout. In fact, you could have done that with most of the characters. But when Perry (Jamie McShane) kills Eryn (Margarita Levieva), he feels remorse, and for all that Jayson is, his motivation for murder is that he’s actually just a man who loves his family. What is so poignant to you about the concept of remorse?

I will say a lot of it is my own Catholic guilt running through every scene. And Grasso, I think, is the character that really shines in that way. If that’s the right word. One of the ideas we really liked about the show was shame and how corrosive shame can be. And Grasso is a character that I think is dealing with an incredible amount of shame and self-hatred. And that’s why he’s constantly asking Tom, Well, what do you think about this? Do you think a guy like me can still, in the eyes of God, be redeemable?

I think when you have remorse, it allows audiences to feel that people aren’t one-dimensional, they’re not one thing. Grasso can be a liar and a guy that loves his sister and his nephews and got into this and got wildly in over his head. Perry can be a guy that was trying to help Jayson because he loves him, and he can be a guy that committed this horrible act of violence. And what we always said on set is it’s OK for characters to hold all those things at once. It’s OK for Robbie to be pistol-whipping people in drug houses and telling his kids bedtime stories. Those two things were able to exist within the same person, and we shouldn’t have to shave off these edges in any way.

I think most shows, even if they’re about things that affect children or young adults, rarely actually give those kids space. Task gives children and young adults tons of screen time to not only be present and vocal, but also to be so smart. Maeve is very intelligent and intuitive. Sam (Ben Lewis Doherty), the son of biker gang members that Robbie winds up abducting, and Harper (Kennedy Moyer), Robbie’s eldest daughter, are incredibly perceptive. Can you talk about the role of children in the story and why it was important to have them be front and center?

I feel like Mare was in so many ways a story about mothers. There were all these generations of mothers literally living under the same roof. But Task is a story about the fathers and the damage they’ve done, and it was important to me to give voice to that pain, to have the kids say, Hey, there’s a ripple effect here. You can’t just throw a stone. And I wanted to see the ripples. Especially with Tom’s daughter, Emily (Silvia Dionicio). It was really important for Emily to be able to say, Fuck, I feel like shit. I’m going through all this pain too, and all I’m ever supposed to feel is grateful [for being adopted] all the time. Well, that’s not how I feel.

It just felt important that the actions weren’t happening in a vacuum. That Robbie isn’t able to get away with this. That Tom isn’t able to be adrift as a father and get away with it. That not being present as a father has an impact on your kids. And it felt like, well, if that’s what it’s about, we have to feel it and hear it. And the way to feel it and hear it is through the children. And so it just was really important to me that the kids had a voice in telling the parents the damage it was doing and the pain it was causing. And also maybe in the end, a way to break that cycle in some way. I think Maeve says in the finale, Well, you take the things you want and you can leave things behind. And my hope is at the end when they leave, when Maeve and the kids are driving away, that they are taking the great things Robbie had, and he had a lot of them, and they’re going to leave behind the things that are going to be negative influences on them as they go into this new life.

But it was really important to me. I really, really fought to keep the kids in the show as much as possible.

I want to unpack the final shot of the show. It’s of Tom sitting on a bed and looking out the window from a freshly repainted room, the room that Sam was occupying and then Ethan (Andrew Russel), his adopted son, before him. He looks out into the backyard, and it’s empty and it’s peaceful and the birds are chirping. Why that shot?

I think what it’s always meant to me, what we always talked about, was that Sam has left, and Tom’s had the ability, the faith, to let Sam go and believe he’s going to be OK with this new family. For me, it’s quite literally getting the home ready for Ethan.

And I always felt that it was a look of, I’m scared. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I have a level of peace and compassion that I’m going to be able to confront my son coming home. It’s not going to be easy, and I know that I don’t have my wife here with me to help, and she was the stronger one in this relationship when it came to dealing with Ethan, but I’m in a place where I’ve been able to forgive my son. And we always talked about it through his experiences with Robbie and witnessing Robbie’s sacrifice. Getting rid of the anger he had toward his son, it’s not going to be easy, but he’s more ready for it than he was in the beginning of the show.

Why have Tom be a bird-watcher?

It’s funny, I’ve gotten this question a lot. But that really is just my uncle. My uncle was an ex-priest, he was an Augustinian for close to 30 years. He left the priesthood. He married a woman. And so whenever I’m trying to craft a character, it helps to just go to the source, and in this case, my uncle is a bird-watcher. And the reason why he’s a bird-watcher is he feels like, Oh, this is a way for me to see God in life. The birds, the beauty of the mother coming back and feeding the kid. And how did they know to do that? Where does that come from?

It really started as a character beat that I felt was honest and represented my idea of Tom as a character. And then we felt, How do we weave it through as a thematic piece? You hear Robbie and Tom talk about vagrant birds when they’re driving out to the woods and we hear birds at the end, when Tom’s sitting on the bed. We liked that as a callback to Is he thinking about Robbie in that moment?

I’m from Philly, and a handful of people have asked me why both Task and Mare are so dark. To me the drama of these shows feels so of the Greater Philadelphia area that I barely register it as that dark. Why do you keep gravitating toward these darker stories? And why do you keep setting them in this area?

I get that a lot! And maybe I’m just completely oblivious, but I always feel like I don’t think it’s that dark. It’s funny because when I think of dark, I think of maybe the Saw movies. But I get the question so much where I have to take it seriously.

The Delco piece of it, I think it’s the people. I always say, It’s the blood in my veins, it’s the people I know. And whenever I sit down to write a story, I feel like maybe out of laziness, I just feel very connected to this place and these people, and I feel like I can write them with an authority that I can’t write characters in other places. I just feel like it gives me confidence as a writer to be able to say, No, I know these people. I know the Grassos of the world. I know where they went to grade school. I know what their home life was like. I know where Lizzie (Alison Oliver) was born. And I can’t say that about other places. And it’s not that I can’t research or go there, and I’ve written stories about other places. But, I was saying this to somebody yesterday, I read an article about Anne Tyler recently, and she’s like, Every time I get done with a book, I think I’m going to sit down and I’m going to write about some other place. And I go back to Baltimore. And I kind of feel a similar thing where I feel very connected to them in a way that gets me excited as a writer to write about these places.

The heaviness or the darkness, I think, comes from wanting to give a character a journey that feels really meaningful. And I want to put the character through it to earn the ending, to earn whatever that moment of catharsis, or grace, or mercy is. And in order to earn that or to feel quite emotional about that, I feel like we have to put them through a lot to get there. It can’t be easy.

I would assume that it also helps you understand when you’ve really tapped into what it is you’re trying to convey. When I was watching the show, the moment where it felt real for me is in the first episode when Robbie’s carrying Sam who’s draped in that Eagles blanket? I know 15 houses that have that exact Eagles blanket. It was that one detail where I was like, Oh, this feels real. I get it now.

It’s funny you say that, because if I was writing about another place I wouldn’t know that detail. And that’s why I do like that I’m able to go down with our production designer and our costume designer, and I’m able to give those details in a way that I quite honestly wouldn’t feel comfortable giving about New Mexico, or Texas, or even California, where I lived for a long time.

Like you said, Oh, I walk down the street, I see kids with the blanket. My son has that blanket. I know this is a part of the lives of these people. I don’t have to fake it. I’ve seen it. I’ve witnessed it. I can put that in there. Like the Phillies cup—I know people who have those. I can say yes to things in a way that I would be asking questions about other places. That’s what we’re always trying to do is aggregate all the details that allow the audience to feel like, “Oh, these people know this place.”

I always like to ask about the finale episode title as one of my questions for a Slate Exit Interview. Here it’s “A Still Small Voice.” I’m assuming it’s taken from the Bible verse.

It is, yes.

Kings 19:12, in the King James Bible: “And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.” What does it mean to you?

Again, I always go back to my uncle, especially in this story when I’m trying to craft the character of Tom. I asked my uncle, “Well, why did you want to be a priest? Why did that come to you?” And he brought up that line, that it wasn’t that God was screaming out to him, or it wasn’t this great epiphany that happened one day, it was just like a consistent voice in his life.

I think in terms of our story, what it means is I don’t think Tom’s going back to church, I don’t think he’s going to the altar and saying, “God, I am here again, and how can I be your servant?” But the theme of the piece was here’s a guy, Tom, that’s lost his faith. And I always felt like the ending of the show, with Tom letting Sam go, was an act of faith on Tom’s part. He’s adopted a kid of his own. It has not worked out the way he imagined it. He has to give Sam away now. He doesn’t want to, he likes Sam, but he has enough belief in good again that he trusts that Sam is going to be OK without him.

Now, is it faith in the God that he signed up for in the seminary? Is it faith that he’s going to go back to the church? I don’t think it’s that, but it’s a belief in goodness again. And so for me, it was that voice coming back to Tom in a way. Whatever voice got him interested in becoming a priest all of those years ago, I felt had gotten quieter and quieter, until the point where it was completely gone. And he says that to Grasso. He says, I went after the source of what that was, but the longer I stayed there the further away it felt to me. I never got as close as I wanted to. I could never really get to the source.

To let the kid go, and clean the room, and open the doors of his house to let his son in. For me, that was that voice that started him on the journey all those years ago. However quiet it is, it’s present.

I think a part of that journey is that he has to not only forgive his son, but he has to forgive himself. He has that moment with Grasso in the hospital, where Grasso asks him, “Aren’t you gonna give me my penance?” And Tom tells him he never did that, because people are too hard on themselves to begin with. And I think a part of him saying that is also him acknowledging that he’s finally forgiven his son and himself.

A hundred percent. And that was actually something we talked about. We couldn’t get it in the show, but we had this whole backstory we talked about with Ruffalo, that on the night where the incident happened, Tom should have been home, but he was so beat down he couldn’t be around. He went out because he just had to get away. What if he had been there? But he couldn’t face it. And I felt like it was probably a little too close to what we did in Mare, when Mare goes home and the daughter’s like, It should have been you, Mom. It should have been you to find him, but I had to find him because you didn’t want to be here. So we kind of avoided it. But 100 percent, he has to forgive himself. And it’s only after he forgives himself that he’s able to forgive his son and welcome him back into the home.

Has talking to your uncle and making the show, crafting Tom and Grasso and all of these characters, changed your feelings or opinion on religion?

Well, I always feel like I’m always just on the journey, Nadira. I always feel like I’m always asking questions. It’s always been hard for me because I do consider myself a believer, but I always ask the questions. You see stories like Camp Mystic, But wait a second. How’s an all merciful God … I don’t understand. How do You let those things happen?

And I think my journey is to continue to ask the questions and try to approach every day with kindness and compassion. And that’s really what I try to do with the characters and try to do in my life. I think it was John Updike who said something like, when they asked him, “Why do you believe in God?,” Well, if I believed this was it, that’s too depressing. I have to believe there’s something. And there’s another great quote that my uncle and I always talked about, I think it was Rabbi Heschel who said, “We’re closest to God when we’re asking the questions, as opposed to when we think we know the answers.”

But I think the one thing I always take from my uncle was he was a very progressive, inclusive priest. It was just to always lead with kindness and inclusivity. My dad might say I’m a cafeteria Catholic. I pick the things I like and I leave the things I don’t like behind. But the things I like are kindness and compassion, and someone who looks at the least of us and brings them in and helps them. Those are the things that I’m really drawn to. And those are the things that I hope I’m able to infuse the characters with is approaching everybody without judgment and trying to understand why they’ve come to the places they’ve come to. I’m always trying to look for the good in everybody. Trying to look for the goodness that’s hidden, or lurking, or under the surface in each of the characters.