{"id":558862,"date":"2026-07-25T11:44:17","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T11:44:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/558862\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T11:44:17","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T11:44:17","slug":"task-season-2-is-a-mare-of-easttown-crossover-event","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/558862\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Task\u2019 Season 2 is a \u2018Mare of Easttown\u2019 Crossover Event"},"content":{"rendered":"

Task and Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby has a superpower, and it’s bizarrely specific: the guy is incredibly good at writing bleak detective shows set in the darker corners of blue-collar Philly. Even if Task didn’t quite live up to the insane heights of Mare of Easttown, it was still one of the TV highlights of 2025<\/a>. The HBO series had almost everything: Mark Ruffalo<\/a> tearing it up as nihilistic FBI agent Tom Brandis, an equally brilliant villain turn from Tom Pelphrey, eerie cinematography, and killer twists to boot<\/a>. It was also bleaker than the day your childhood dog died\u2014but that was a feature, not a bug.<\/p>\n

The show was so great\u2014and so well-received\u2014that although it was initially announced as a miniseries, HBO green-lit a second season soon after the first one finished. Another surprising and unconventional development soon followed: as Variety reported<\/a> earlier this month, Julianne Nicholson is joining the Task cast as Lori Ross, the character she first played in Mare\u2014the best friend of Kate Winslet’s titular detective.<\/p>\n

We’re in for a Marvel<\/a>-style crossover event<\/a>, but make it prestige TV. But in this case, it feels like more than just smashing existentially-despairing toys together. The two shows have enough in common that it makes plenty of sense to imagine them existing in the same world, for starters, and it’s not like either of them loses anything with the merger. And whatever grants Nicholson more screen time\u2014in lieu of an actual second season of Mare\u2014seems absolutely fine to us.<\/p>\n

No word yet on how or when Nicholson’s Lori will appear in Task season two\u2014all that has been revealed about the plot is a teeny, pointedly ambiguous logline. \u201cTom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo<\/a>) takes the helm of a new task force, but the deeper the operation runs, the harder it is to tell who’s the target,\u201d it reads. Whoa, don’t tell us too much!<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, it’s pretty much a top-to-bottom shake-up for the series ensemble, with Ruffalo the only holdover from season one, at least as far as we know. Fortunately, Task has recruited some super-high-calibre new names: the statement signing has to be Oscar-winner (and True Detective alum) Mahershala Ali<\/a>. He will reportedly play Eddie Barnes, \u201ca seasoned and well-respected DEA agent in Philadelphia\u201d who comes to blows with Brandis and his team.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, terrific character actors like Pillion<\/a>‘s Harry Melling and Chernobyl’s Adam Nagaitis make for similarly tantalizing additions. There’s no word, of course, on the possibility of another appearance by Kate Winslet, aka Mare herself\u2014but given the shared universe of it all, you never know.<\/p>\n

This story originally appeared in British GQ<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Task and Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby has a superpower, and it’s bizarrely specific: the guy is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":558863,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[1503,6613,146,85,46,19828,7945,411],"class_list":["post-558862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-culture","tag-digital_syndication","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-mark-ruffalo","tag-textbelowcenterfullbleed","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558862\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}