The Brad Ingelsby Guide to Delaware County
The creator of ‘Mare of Easttown’ and ‘Task’ has found a rich well of pathos and plot in the towns just outside Philadelphia. Allow him to explain why.The Brad Ingelsby Guide to Delaware County
The creator of ‘Mare of Easttown’ and ‘Task’ has found a rich well of pathos and plot in the towns just outside Philadelphia. Allow him to explain why.
In the spring of 2021, Mare of Easttown debuted on HBO and tucked viewers into a pocket of Philadelphia that they had probably never seen—or, more crucially, heard—before: Delaware County, better known as “Delco.” Instead of highlighting Philly’s familiar skyline or Old City’s cobblestone streets, Brad Ingelsby’s crime drama showcased the city’s blue-collar suburbs—the dreary streets, cramped row homes, tight-knit communities, regionally specific food, and thick, working-class accents—where he’d grown up. The show was teeming with lived-in authenticity, shaped by someone who knew the place by heart.
Throughout its run, Mare became an online phenomenon—not necessarily for its murder mystery but for the way Kate Winslet pronounced her vowels and the many errant Wawa wrappers that littered her coffee table. TV critics and journalists wrote about Delco’s distinctive patois, gloomy aesthetic and themes, and culinary hallmarks and the way Inglesby and his crew used all of them to give the show a rare sense of place. Unlike decades of movies and television that leaned on the same Philly clichés, Ingelsby had tapped into the ugly beauty of his backyard—substance abuse, violence, dead-end jobs, Catholic guilt, the exhaustion of living in the same place your whole life—and jarred something loose across the country.
Over the next four years, the Berwyn native (who moved back to his hometown from Los Angeles in 2021) saw his show’s influence all over a string of über-specific, Philly-set series—Abbott Elementary, Dope Thief, Long Bright River, Deli Boys—that were similarly keen on highlighting the authentic color of their communities. “What Mare affirmed was you can write about home with a lot of specificity—and people like that. It's not a turnoff,” Ingelsby says. “When I was younger, I often [wondered], if I write about this specific place, am I going to alienate people? In fact, it was quite the opposite reaction. The more specific we got about this place, the more people wrapped their arms around it.”
Staying on ‘Task’
Now, with Task—whose season finale airs this Sunday—Ingelsby has returned to his neck of the woods with another gritty tale and broader palette of Philly characters. Not exactly a Mare spinoff (although the Easttown police department makes a brief appearance), the seven-episode series once again navigates through Delaware and parts of Chester County. If Mare introduced America to Delco, Task feels like a full-on tour along the turnpike, cataloging more of southeastern Pennsylvania’s haunts, favorites, and details—all guided by a storyteller eager to keep building out his own, niche DCU (Delaware County Universe).
To explain what keeps drawing him back and to help viewers better appreciate each show’s Philadelphian charm, Ingelsby broke down the roots, rituals, and hot spots of the place he still calls home.
The Vibe
The oldest settled section of Pennsylvania, sitting just west of Philadelphia, Delaware County spans just 184 square miles—the third-smallest county in the state—but it is the fourth-most populous. It’s a tightly packed sprawl of boroughs and back roads where one town fades into the next and everyone seems to know someone’s cousin. You get that feeling right away in Mare, from the town’s condensed brick row homes, spontaneous family gatherings, and familiar faces in every store or restaurant. Mare’s ex-husband, Frank (David Denman), even lives directly behind her, accentuating Easttown's sometimes comical interconnectedness. “I'm one of those people. I live a mile away from my parents. And my brother's a couple of miles away. My sister's a couple of miles away. Our kids get together all the time,” Ingelsby says. “It's like I've fallen into Mare's zone here.”
That “duty to family,” he says, extends into religion. In the latest census, about 32 percent of Delco’s population identified as Catholic, down from about 50 percent in 2000. Ingelsby notes that most county residents introduce themselves by asking about someone’s place of worship. “It's not so much ‘Where did you grow up?’ It's ‘What parish were you from?’” Ingelsby says. “That's a very common way of getting to know people.” In fact, Ingelsby notes that the idea for Tom to be a former priest in Task stemmed straight from his own uncle, who had also left the priesthood. “I see him all the time,” Ingelsby says. “We have dinner, we chat about these things. Where'd you go to the seminary? What was that like? What was your experience like at a parish? What was it like hearing a confession?”
Outside of faith and family, Ingelsby feels a kinship with Delco’s working-class population and lunch-pail ethos. Across the contemporary television landscape, he’s observed a dearth of stories about that specific demographic, which further convinced him to set Mare and Task in the region as a way to explore more of the community’s hardships and lifestyle. “I really like this idea of getting up every day, and maybe you don't love your job or your workplace, but you get up and put in a shift and you work hard because you want to take care of your kids,” he says. “That kind of spirit I really respond to. I think there's a heroism in that.”
The Loyalty
That claustrophobic kind of culture heavily influences the Delco mindset—and by extension, Ingelsby’s protagonists. Like many people in Delco, Mare can’t leave her family and community—perhaps a symptom of guilt or of an overwhelming need to give back to the town and the people who raised her. The paradox there is that it allows her easier access to information but makes it painfully difficult to investigate the people she loves. “It's hard to be a detective in a place where you know everyone,” Ingelsby says. “I felt like Mare was constantly having to navigate the professional and the personal. And she was a prickly person, too, so it made those interactions really funny.”
In the fifth episode of Task, Ingelsby underlined that theme again during a tense conversation between Tom and Robbie. The FBI agent equates his captor, dead set on making a new life in Canada, to a summer tanager, a vagrant bird that can sometimes veer off its usual migratory destination and rarely survives the journey. It’s a dark metaphor, highlighting the difficulty of a Delco lifer losing his family and friends and starting fresh elsewhere. Ingelsby, though, wrote the scene out of understanding. Although he originally left his hometown for Hollywood, he had a strong desire to return and establish roots again with his family. “I felt in my heart that I was going to move home,” he says. “I wasn't quite sure when it was going to happen. I've been here for three years, and I've never looked back. I know exactly that I'm supposed to be here. I feel completely at home here. My kids are completely at home here.”
The Accent
There’s a reason Winslet called the Philly accent one of the “top two hardest” she’s ever had to master. Not many actors have tried it—let alone pulled it off. The dialect forges northeastern sounds (making the short o in fog sound like awe) with southern vowels. Numerous rhyming words boast different pronunciations. According to Ingelsby, the clearest indication of accuracy is whether you can pull off the long o sound, turning hoagie into howe-gie or online into own-line, a word that makes its way into Task early on. And don't forget about pronouncing water like wooder, which even Ingelsby slips into his conversations. It’s what assures him that he’s back in southeastern PA, and it’s what makes his shows feel like they belong on the streets where they’re shooting.
To catch these details, Mare and Task dialect coach Susanne Sulby worked with both Winslet and Emilia Jones (who plays Robbie’s niece in Task) on set for hours each day, helping them harness the phonetics so that they became second nature and each actor could focus on their character’s emotional journeys. “She’ll go record people, and then we’ll listen to them and say, ‘Well, let’s be in this range,’ or we’ll say, ‘Wow, that’s way too strong for that character—no way,’” Ingelsby says. “It’s a little bit of trial and error.” Ingelsby also took his actors around to various Delco restaurants and shops to speak with locals and get a better sense of the culture and rhythms in their natural environment. “If Kate's doing it and Kate's investing in it and she wants to get it right, we've got to get it right,” Ingelsby says. “Everyone else had to get on board.”
Ruffalo escaped accent school, mostly because Ingelsby figured that his character, having grown up closer to Philadelphia’s city line in Drexel Hill, wouldn’t have picked up a thick one. It’s just another variation that he and the crew wanted to account for. “My wife, who grew up in Aston, has a couple of words that I think you could hear, but it’s very, very subtle,” he says. “What we had to do was go through character by character: ‘Where did this person grow up? What’s been their life experience? What is the level of the accent?’”
“At this point,” he adds, “if you're coming into a Brad Ingelsby Delco show, you know you're going to do some form of an accent.”
The Great Outdoors
Another rule of thumb: If you’re in a Brad Ingelsby drama and find yourself in Wissahickon Valley Park, there’s a good chance something bad is about to happen. In Mare, police find the body of teenager Erin McMenamin lying along the rocks of the Wissahickon Creek, a discovery that kick-starts the plot and sends shock waves through the community. The park also plays host to a climactic chase and fatal shoot-out in Task’s explosive sixth episode. Its hilly and rocky terrain in the shadow of Philadelphia’s skyline made it a perfect location. “I just think visually, it gives you so many cool options,” Ingelsby says. “And in a big, big sequence like this, you want every segment to feel interesting and new.”
Ahead of shooting, director Salli Richardson-Whitfield walked the sprawling park and large creek numerous times, scoping out different areas that could break up the sequence and make each piece of the violent skirmish feel distinct. Ultimately, she and Ingelsby decided on setting Robbie and Tom’s encounter around a cabin, Lizzie (Allison Oliver) and Grasso’s (Fabien Frankel) story beside a clump of boulders, and Kathleen (Martha Plimpton) and Aleah’s (Thuso Mbedu) component in a flatter shrub patch. “Each section had a defining characteristic that made an audience go, ‘OK, I know where we are,’” Ingelsby says. “The ability to go to those places and lean into the specific visuals within that area of the park was really helpful.”
The Nightlife
As a college student at Villanova, Ingelsby often found refuge at Barnaby’s Restaurant and Pub, a sports bar with a few locations in the area. “That was my spot,” Ingelsby says. Often, he and his friends swung by after finishing a baseball game, slugging back “way too many Miller Lites,” eating wings, and enjoying the establishment’s big, sprawling outdoor deck. He recalls going to Thursday DJ nights in the downstairs bar, which turned into a dance floor and became more of a club. “Maybe not my scene as much,” he says, “but I was down there.”
Ingelsby wanted to shoot part of Task’s third episode at its Aston location, but the space and design didn't work for the scene. The crew settled for the Ridley House on McDade Boulevard, which just so happened to be a Barnaby’s until 2019. It brought back some nostalgia, but Ingelsby also felt that his old watering hole had the right vibe for Lizzie to show off her party-girl personality to Grasso. “When I thought of Allison, I just thought, ‘She’s a Barnaby’s girl.’ Like, I can totally see her having a few too many, the bartender trying to get her out of there but letting her do her thing,” Ingelsby says. “He probably knows her from high school; he’s gonna let her smoke without a reprimand.”
Because Mare is closer to middle age, Ingelsby scanned for more dive bars and taverns around the region that catered to that character’s demographic and economic background. For one of Mare’s dates with Richard (Guy Pearce), Ingelsby went down to Marcus Hook, close to the Delaware River, to shoot inside the Star Hotel bar, which fit the “getting the guys together after a softball game” vibe he was looking for. It’s a nice contrast to one of the pair’s upscale, candlelit dinner dates inside a homestyle restaurant that Richard suggests. “That's way more Chester County,” Ingelsby says. “He's taken Mare out of her comfort zone a little bit.”
The Food
It takes only one episode of Task to run through a grocery list of the Philly region’s proprietary brands and local delicacies. Instead of going straight into the obvious—Tastykakes, soft pretzels, hoagies—Ingelsby tapped into his childhood, starting with scrapple: a square loaf of cornmeal ground with various discarded pork parts that Tom offers to make for his daughter. Ingelsby best describes it as “all the leftovers smushed together and fried up in some kind of brick” (it tastes much better than it looks, he assures me). Hundreds of years ago, German immigrants brought the meat-and-grain product to America’s mid-Atlantic states, where it became a Quaker delicacy. Today, it remains a breakfast staple on Delco diner menus. “I really learned of scrapple from my father,” Ingelsby says. “Although I have to be honest, I haven't seen him have it in a long, long time.”
Besides scrapple, Ingelsby has personal connections to all of the food items and establishments he’s chosen to highlight. As a kid, he picked out school snacks with his mom at Acme, the mega grocery store that recently added a location in Newtown Square, where he thought Tom would shop. One of the first beers he stole out of a friend’s refrigerator as a teenager was a Yuengling (“I'd be lying if it didn't always bring back a time in my life,” he says). And during his adult stint in L.A., Wawa, featured prominently in Mare, became a friendly, nostalgic welcome home around the holidays. Now more nationally recognized, the convenience store continues to be a memory palace, drawing him back in time each time he enters its doors. “My grandmother got really bad rheumatoid arthritis and had to move into our house with us,” Ingelsby recalls. “One of the things she loved most in her life was a French vanilla coffee at Wawa.”
In Task, however, Ingelsby gives top billing to Rita’s Italian Ice, where Tom’s daughter Emily (Silvia Dionicio) works summer nights. At first, the show’s other director, Jeremiah Zagar, a Philadelphia native, suggested including John’s Water Ice, but Ingelsby knew that would ring false, considering it operates only in the city. “You're just going off of what would be true to the character,” says Ingelsby, who frequently visits Rita’s. “What would be around Tom's house? It just felt so obvious to me that it would be Rita's.” It also made sense as Emily’s summer job, although Ingelsby admits that he had some internal dialogue about the decision. “There’s the Philly Pretzel Company—she could work there,” he recalls thinking before he homed in on Rita’s. “That feels more like a teenage spot in the summer.” As for Tom’s choice of black cherry flavor, Ingelsby admits that was all him. “I love the wild cherry so much that if I'm going to Rita's, 99 percent of the time, I'm going to get the wild cherry.”
The Sports
Nobody needs another explainer about Philly sports fans and their long, unceremonious history. They’re abrasive, crass, and relentless, which is also to say: passionate, honest, and loyal. But Ingelsby, the son of a Villanova basketball player, knew that the region’s fandom manifested in ways beyond stadium attributes. As a result, he leaned into the ambient noise, colors, and knowledge around town—the way that the teams seep into everyday life—by including nods to all four major Philly sports teams: an Eagles championship cup, a Flyers phone case, a Phillies souvenir cup, and an Allen Iverson tattoo.
Outside of representation, Ingelsby notes that suburban fandom is most prominently felt in its seasonal and weekly traditions. That every Sunday in the fall and winter is devoted to the Eagles—or that summer weekends meant the Phillies on the radio. Ingelsby finds the collective calendar magical. “More so than other places I've lived, it's a part of your routine, it's a part of your life,” he says. “When I was in California, it felt like it wasn't appointment viewing. Oh, I caught the last quarter of the Rams game. It wasn't a part of the routine in a way where it is here. Everyone is so knowledgeable about the team and what's happening. They let it impact their lives in ways maybe they shouldn't at times. When you wake up on a Monday morning and the Eagles have lost, like, man, you feel it.”
When I commend Ingelsby for infusing some Phillies radio clips into Task, he credits his uncle, a devoted 94 WIP listener, with instituting the generational practice. “I always imagined that it was something Tom Brandis did with his father—that shared connection of listening to the Phillies games—and he's taken that with him as he's become a father in life,” Ingelsby says. However, sharp listeners can tell that’s not the team’s actual radio voice, Scott Franzke, coming through the speakers. It’s an error that Ingelsby promises to fix in the future. “I'm going to go back to them and get the real thing,” he says.