In Mare of Easttown, the previous Delaware County–set series that Brad Ingelsby made for HBO, solving crimes was women’s work: Kate Winslet’s blowsy, grimacing turn as a detective in a Philly exurb was thrilling to watch not just for her flattened vowels and bone-deep sighs but for her character’s authority. Looking more exhausted than any TV character in recent memory, Mare investigated murders, raised her grandson, and presided over her community with questionable ethics but unfailing care. The show’s local specificity—Mare scarfed down hoagies and found a crucial clue next to a treasured piece of Eagles memorabilia—earned its own Saturday Night Live parody (“Your pop was a cop, and your pop-pop was a cop, and your pop-pop’s pop-pop was the original Phillie Phanatic”). But the show’s matriarchal power structures, which involved women like Mare forever cleaning up the messes their male relatives made, were carefully shaded.Task, Ingelsby’s new HBO miniseries, has a dynamic that’s almost exactly inverted. The show is a crime thriller but not a mystery; the question is less about who did what than about who we should really be rooting for. The first episode immediately introduces Tom (played by Mark Ruffalo), a grizzled former Catholic priest turned FBI agent, and Robbie (Tom Pelphrey), a trash collector with a side hustle robbing drug houses by way of documenting their daily routines. Tom wakes alone, prays, struggles through a tedious day, and drinks too much vodka out of a Phillies plastic cup. Robbie cradles his sleeping child; bonds with his best friend, Cliff (Raúl Castillo), during a discussion about dating and intimacy; and then carefully removes his gun from a lockbox in preparation for a violent raid. Task’s juxtaposition of the two men, the cop and the robber, is unsubtle: Tom is withdrawn, and Robbie is affectionate. (Ruffalo is dour and uncharacteristically muted; Pelphrey is hypnotic.) Tom passes out nightly, waking in the morning to see his daughter fleeing on her bike to school so she doesn’t have to interact with him; Robbie tells his kids bedtime stories about dragons and has no qualms expressing love.[Read: What HBO’s new crime show gets exactly right]Inevitably, one of Robbie’s invasions goes very wrong, and Tom is assigned to form a task force to investigate. The show’s pace at first is a test of patience—Task parcels out its details, lingering on shots of the birds Tom watches through binoculars, and the endless green of the Pennsylvania woods. Only over the course of several episodes do we quite figure out, say, what happened to Tom’s wife, or why his family has a sentencing hearing coming up, or why Robbie has such a fraught relationship with his niece, the 21-year-old Maeve (Emilia Jones). The show’s world slowly expands; we’re introduced to a biker gang that traffics fentanyl up and down the East Coast, a handful of inexperienced agents and state police officers who get absorbed into Tom’s task force, stray villains with face tattoos, cheerful water-ice vendors. At first, I wondered why Ingelsby, who wrote such compelling women for Mare, was casting them here as ancillary characters at best. But as the show goes on, this absence starts to feel more and more intentional. The world it depicts is one that women simply can’t seem to endure—they get hurt or killed, or they vanish altogether. The bonds in Task are between men and other men, whether the backdrop is a barroom or a church; the loyalties, power structures, rivalries, and affections are all patriarchal. And the consequences, as we get to watch, are monstrous.Unlike Mare, whose community was cloistered and intimate, Task builds a wider world of dealers, gangsters, and thieves, not always to its benefit. A scene in which a Dominican drug lord opines about racism feels pat, and the bikers never get enough detail of their own to move beyond stereotype, although a moment in which one crime boss gazes mournfully at a commemorative photo album made me wonder which hardened biker took the time to print out all the pictures. Mare had a distinctive sense of humor, with Jean Smart’s Fruit Ninja–obsessed great-grandma and Mare’s deadpan one-liners; the only time I laughed during Task was when one character mulls whether he’s accidentally kidnapped the most depressing man alive. (He has.)[Read: The real twist of Mare of Easttown]Still, the show’s insight into institutions—how they function, what they require, what they enforce—is acute, and its action is riveting. Within the FBI, Tom’s boss, Kathleen (Martha Plimpton), is a firebrand with language so coarse that it stops Tom in his tracks, as though she’s absorbed the necessary chauvinistic qualities in order to ascend the career ladder. Tom’s appointees on the task force include Lizzie (Alison Oliver), a state police officer who’s regularly tormented by her fellow cops, and Aleah (Thuso Mbedu), who wins over a suspect in interrogation by sharing awful details of her past. The Dark Hearts biker gang being targeted by Robbie has its own internal code, rigorously enforcing obedience but also offering members kinship, even a warped kind of mentorship. Both organizations, it turns out, contain members who can’t be trusted, although the twists and turns of who’s betraying whom feel less consequential than inexorable.The choice Task makes to soften Ruffalo’s natural affability and presence in favor of Pelphrey’s Robbie—who transmits anger and despair with palpable, desperate energy—is a fascinating one, requiring humility from one actor and intense commitment from the other. In its final episodes, the show builds to a climax that’s protracted over several episodes, drawing out the series’ ideas about masculinity, rage, and forgiveness. When Tom and Robbie finally meet, in a scene where the dynamics are constantly shifting, their connection feels charged, which it should—Tom, who abandoned the Catholic Church to marry his wife, rejected one fraternal order for the FBI; Robbie is waging a hopeless war against another. Both men seem to feel cursed. But there’s something grimly revelatory about watching all of these different hierarchies collide—so many clenched fists heading toward impact.