September 10, 2025
Peter Kramer/HBO
Jeremiah Zagar (center) chats with 'Task' creator Brad Ingelsby (right) and cast member Martha Plimpton (left) on the set of the HBO show, which airs Sundays.
Jeremiah Zagar grew up in Philadelphia, amid the mosaics his father Isaiah plastered on the sides of so many rowhomes and the artistic community that his parents fostered along South Street. The city is also where he directed "Hustle," the Adam Sandler basketball drama, and "In a Dream," the unflinching documentary on his famous family. But for "Task," the crime series now airing on HBO, the filmmaker had to go to the suburbs.
Zagar directs four of the show's seven episodes, including its premiere last Sunday and the finale airing Oct. 19. To accurately capture the wild beauty and unassuming haunts of the city's surrounding counties, he leaned on Berwyn native Brad Ingelsby, the show's creator who arguably kicked off the recent wave of Philly-area crime shows with "Mare of Easttown."
"We did so much prep, Brad and I," Zagar said. "We worked together every week for almost a year, even before shooting. So we were lockstep. And it was a wonderful, intrinsic collaboration. One of the best in my life for sure."
That partnership has produced a show that, like "Mare," is really a family drama when you peel away the badges and bulletproof vests. While the show's title references a FBI task force searching for thieves ripping off stash houses (sound familiar?), the beats that linger are the moments inside the homes of Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo), the special agent and grieving family man in charge of the operation, and Robbie Prendergrast (Tom Pelphrey), the struggling father behind the robberies.
Zagar, 44, who has two kids of his own, employed his longtime collaborator, the acting coach Noelle Gentile, to give these family scenes extra weight.
"We are attempting with the young people ... to create an environment where they can feel free to be intimate and to improvise," he said. "Often when you put trained actors with young kids or non-actors or actors who hadn't acted before together in intimate environments, things happen that are sort of magical. And I remember the first scene we did with Robbie and (his daughter) and his son in their bed (in the season premiere) where he's got his son's hand on his chest. I remember this feeling like you were invading the privacy of someone's own bedroom."
Zagar strove to foster a welcoming environment with his adult actors, too. Before anyone arrived on set, his assistant sent out a list of recommended Philadelphia restaurants for the cast to check out between shoots. Fabien Frankel, who plays one of the three cops assigned to the task force, still has it saved on his phone — and patronized several spots, including South Philly Barbacoa.
While Zagar might be the "oracle of good restaurants," per Frankel, his cast also jokes that it's telling his assistant emailed the restaurant picks. The director, despite his familiarity with cameras and microphones, cultivated a reputation as a bit of a Luddite. He was known to carry a flip phone on set.
"It's always a miracle when he reaches out to you in any way," Frankel said. "It's always like one line on text. He does email a bit now."
Zagar cut his teeth on HBO documentaries. His 2008 feature debut was as personal as they come; "In a Dream" is a biopic of the filmmaker's father that stars the entire family — Isaiah, his wife Julia, eldest son Ezekiel and Zagar himself — and delves into the mental illness, addiction and infidelity that nearly unraveled them. It made the Oscars shortlist for best documentary feature. Six years later, Zagar made another nonfiction movie that aired on the network about the convicted murderer Pamela Smart.
"We the Animals" marked his transition into the fictional realm and breakout as a filmmaker. The 2018 Sundance darling caught the eye of Adam Sandler, who later approached Zagar about directing "Hustle." He hasn't made another movie since then, but another is on the way. "The Painted Bride" will star Mandy Patinkin, Isabella Rossellini and Jeremy Allen White as a stop motion animator creating a project for his son and dying father. The film bears no relation, Zagar stressed, to the Old City art center his father covered in mosaics.
"I just always loved the name," Zagar said. "My father decorated it, and so in some ways it just memorializes the space. ... It's sort of a callback to the earlier films that I've done, like 'We the Animals' and 'In a Dream.' It's an inventive family drama and it's similar, I would say, to the movies that I fell in love with in the '90s, like the Charlie Kaufman, Spike Jonez comedy-dramas that really delved into the pathos of the human problem."
Little else is known about the movie, but it promises distinctive visuals: Zagar estimates that about 20% of the film is rendered in stop motion animation. He hopes to begin shooting next spring or summer.
As his resume demonstrates, Zagar has never shied away from painful family trauma. This courage made him, in many ways, an ideal partner for Ingelsby, another creative interested in difficult interpersonal relationships — and convinced that there's a path out of the darkness.
"I think that the world feels often very hopeless," Zagar said. "I see a lot of media, shows, movies that ignore that hopelessness. And I think Brad faces it head on. At the end, he ultimately wants to give us a glimmer of a possibility that things can get better, because I think we all want to believe that. I think we need to believe that. I mean, I know I need to because I have two young children. I need to believe that there's a possibility that this world will not remain stuck the way it has."
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