Crime dramas, especially in our distracted times, tend to front-load said crimes. More often than not, there’s a murder within the first five minutes. This is only one of the genre’s many implicit rules that HBO’s Task breaks. Premiering Sept. 7, the series from Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby opens with a montage of quotidian scenes from the lives of two men. Weary Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo) folds his hands in prayer, dunks his face in a sink full of ice water, downs Advil while driving. Rugged Robbie Prendergrast (Tom Pelphrey) carries his sleeping son to bed, pours himself a tall mug of coffee, perks up at a radio ad for a dating app.[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]These tender parallel portraits introduce the characters whose analogous circumstances and divergent choices are, more than any murder or mystery, the show’s central subject. Like Mare, but slightly more elegant in its plotting, Task uses the detective-story format and the specificity of its rural Pennsylvania setting to explore elemental human problems. Whereas the former revealed the many ways in which the responsibility for keeping families and communities together falls on women (an observation that informs the new series as well), Ingelsby’s latest makes an astute study of guilt, revenge, and forgiveness.Task’s dual protagonists fall on opposite sides of the law. Still hurting a year after his wife left him and their two kids, Robbie works in sanitation with his best friend, Cliff (Raúl Castillo). Recently, they’ve been meeting up at night with a third friend to rob trap houses. The men disguise themselves from targets who might recognize them, mostly members of a biker gang called the Dark Hearts, with Halloween masks; they brandish guns but avoid violence. As far as felonies go, the bloodless armed robbery of drug dealers ranks low on the moral-outrage scale—until a victim catches a glimpse of one assailant’s face. Then, suddenly, Robbie and his boys are murderers.An FBI veteran on career-fair recruitment duty in the wake of his wife’s death, Tom is tapped to head a task force investigating these crimes. (Hence the show’s bland title.) His staff, culled from a hodgepodge of local law-enforcement groups, is green. While Anthony (Fabien Frankel) chats amiably, Aleah (The Underground Railroad star Thuso Mbedu, who should really be getting more of this kind of work) is all business. Lizzie (Alison Oliver), a young divorcée, just seems like a mess. Meanwhile, Tom’s adopted son, Ethan (Andrew Russel), is in jail awaiting trial; Tom and his teenage daughter, Ethan’s biological sister Emily (Silvia Dionicio), must decide whether to support him in court despite the unimaginable pain he has caused their family.While the similarities between Tom’s and Robbie’s lives pile up as the series progresses, the most crucial connections are immediately apparent. Both men are fathers who love their children fiercely but have come somewhat unmoored since losing their wives. (In lieu of criminal activity, Tom drinks too much.) In defiance of their respective tough-guy roles, both are also preternaturally gentle, thoughtful, vulnerable. That their contradictions cohere into believable personalities is a credit to Ruffalo and especially Pelphrey, whose plaintive delivery of lines like “I need a life companion” could shatter your heart.There are moments when Task belabors the comparison between its two leads, though never to the extent that Ingelsby’s ruminations derail a story that only works so well thanks to its richly shaded characters. This is not a tale of good guys vs. bad guys. Villains emerge, to be sure. But the real, rarer and less predictable conflicts are the internal struggles of people whose laudable intentions bump up against desperate situations. This liberates the show from the crime-investigation-arrest plot arc typical of this genre without robbing it of suspense. Episodes are propelled, instead, by rising tensions around the impossible choices characters must make. It’s easy to do the right thinguntil someone wrongs you. How does a good person respond when someone hurts the people they love?It’s refreshing that in a series so concerned with masculine burdens and bonds between men, many of these multilayered characters are female. As in Mare, young women are forced, often by the actions of the men in their lives, to grow up early. Robbie has moved into the home of his late brother, whose 21-year-old daughter, Maeve (Emilia Jones, excellent), would leave town in a second if the family could survive without the domestic labor she exhaustedly performs. Emily is torn between the gratitude she feels compelled to show Tom for taking her in and loyalty to Ethan. There’s more to Lizzie and Aleah than is initially apparent (although I would have liked to see Taskgo a bit deeper into Aleah’s life outside work).Task subverts expectations without sanctimony. It acknowledges that violent criminals can have kind hearts, that law-enforcement leaders can be as corrupt as biker-gang bosses, and that sometimes when something tragic happens, punishing the person who’s nominally responsible doesn’t always constitute justice. In a subtly radical statement, at a time when many Americans instinctively sort strangers into political categories, it refuses to stereotype characters based on their tribe. Tom is a former priest as well as an FBI agent, but he’s no saint; it would be boring if he were. The show’s emphasis on forgiveness, rather than justice as defined by a flawed legal system, follows from Tom’s faith as well as from the grace it gives to each character. Even if they can’t avoid the consequences of their worst decisions, they can work to ensure that they aren’t ultimately defined by them.