The Task is a tale from the underbelly of small-town America

Its creator, Brad Ingelsby, has now delivered Task, a grinding thriller set in the same location with different characters. It features a former priest turned FBI agent Tom, played by Mark Ruffalo. Left broken by the death of his wife in shattering circumstances, assigned to running an FBI recruitment stall, Tom pickles his sorrows in alcohol, waking himself up by plunging his face into iced water.

His boss – the reliably acidic Martha Plimpton – sends him to look into robberies targeting drug dens run by a biker gang called the Dark Hearts. The robbers scope out targets while working on garbage truck. They’re led by Robbie (Tom Pelphrey, devastating as Laura Linney’s bipolar sibling in Ozark), a single parent whose brother was killed by the Dark Hearts. He hankers for a better life for his children and his niece, Maeve (Emilia Jones), who’s lumbered with most of the childcare and thinks he’s a capital-L loser. After a robbery goes badly, bloodily, wrong, Robbie must deal with 20 kilos of uncut fentanyl and a child as an unwanted hostage.

Like Mare, this is a tale from the underbelly of an American small town: full of blue-collar hardmen, hypervigilant children, nervous wives, bloodshed and nihilism. Every move Robbie makes sucks him deeper into the quicksand of criminality. Tom has his own dysfunctional work gang: among his young taskforce, twitchy state trooper Lizzie (Alison Oliver from Conversations With Friends) seems especially overwhelmed. For relief, Tom birdwatches, but that quirk starts to feel laboured – as, frankly, does the series as a whole, drawn out over seven meandering episodes.

There’s a heaviness here, a superfluity of characters, subplots and themes – morality, faith, grief, family – a plodding of pace and a self-indulgence that results in the main thread of the series climaxing prematurely, leaving a chunk of time to fill with what feels like clearing up.

It’s powerfully performed, but the thriller element falls away too readily and it becomes a dual character study of two suffering men on opposite sides of the law, who really aren’t so different. I end up admiring Task; it just doesn’t quite sing. Though I do wonder if it suffers unfairly from all the anticipation after Mare.

On Amazon Prime Video, The Girlfriend is a glossy, overheated, female-centred thriller to spice up the darkening autumn nights. Based on the 2017 novel by Michelle Frances, and set in London, it stars House of Cards’s Robin Wright as Laura, a wealthy art gallerist, whose medical student son, Daniel (Laurie Davidson), brings home estate agent Cherry, played by Olivia Cooke (Alicent in House of the Dragon).

The two women loathe each other on sight. Laura thinks working-class Cherry is a conniving gold-digger; Cherry views Laura as a controlling ice-queen unhealthily fixated on her son. Sex steams up the action when it should and when it shouldn’t: some scenes between Laura and Daniel (in pools, or saunas) are soaked in cloying quasi-eroticism. But Laura unearths disquieting information about Cherry. At one point, one of them tells a terrible lie that burns everything down.

With Wright directing three of the six episodes, the women’s separate perspectives are conveyed by showing virtually the same scenes from each other’s point of view, complete with title cards “Laura” and “Cherry” – an effect that gives The Girlfriend a disorienting ambivalence that works well. While the menfolk barely get a look-in, both women are monsters one minute; raw, hurting and human the next.

The Girlfriend is try-hard salubrious. (Penthouses! Mediterranean villas! Yachts!) Laura’s home is like an intimidating posh hotel where you daren’t order room service. The ending is overblown and ridiculous – as realistic as Fatal Attraction. Does it matter? Not really. I love The Girlfriend’s soapy hyperreal campness: there are times when it’s as if Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were battling away, but with an age gap. Enjoy.

The Immigration Debate was an hour-long live show presented by Sky News in Birmingham. Host Trevor Phillips asked: “Is immigration changing our nation, and, if it is, is it for better or for worse?” He fielded questions from the audience, Question Time-style, for Home Office minister Mike Tapp, shadow justice minister Kieran Mullan, Liberal Democrat MP Lisa Smart and Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf, who isn’t even an MP. Where was Nigel Farage, usually so keen to cosy up to cameras; is the Reform leader too grand for TV debating now?

The live debate was a bold move by Sky News. It’s not that immigration, legal and illegal, shouldn’t be discussed – the figures rose most under 14 years of Tory government and the vast majority of it is legal – it’s how quickly such discussions polarise and degenerate. In Birmingham, it wasn’t long before it was all grisly bickering about asylum hotels and small boats (according to statistics given by Sky News’s Ed Conway, the latter account for less than 5% of the total figures).

There was a relatively warm moment when panel members discussed their own family émigré stories: Smart’s Jewish grandmother in the 1930s, Yusuf’s Sri Lankan doctor-and-nurse parents. There was also discussion of the huge contributions immigrants make to Britain. Mainly, though, it was party lines (Tapp pushing Labour’s middle ground; Mullan astonishingly bringing up Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda scheme) and pre-written spiels (everyone), the audience questions barely dealt with. And there was some inflammatory bluster (guess who?). When Yusuf ranted about “fighting-age men who hate our country”, Tapp, an Afghanistan veteran, finally snapped, calling Reform “plastic patriots”.

In the reaction show afterwards, the new Green party leader, Zack Polanski, called the debate panel, “grim, depressing and pretty indicative of the state of political conversation in our country”. Quite. The Immigration Debate failed to tackle this contentious issue but it did highlight how bad we are at talking about it.

Downton Abbey Celebrates the Grand Finale

(ITVX)

To mark the final film, Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, stars of the Julian Fellowes aristo phenomenon are interviewed at the Savoy. They’re all friends, which is both touching and disappointing. The late, great Dame Maggie Smith could get fidgety in the makeup chair, but that’s your lot, gossip-wise.

Only Murders in the Building

(Disney+)

The return of the cosy crime blockbuster starring Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez. This time, Renée Zellweger pitches up as a billionaire.

The Newsreader

(BBC Two)

The final series of the layered, riveting Australian drama about a scheming 1980s newsroom. Starring Anna Torv and Sam Reid.

Photographs by Tom Pelphrey, Amazon Prime