When television journalist Alan Sepinwall inadvertently referred to Delaware County as rural America in a New York Times opinion piece, freelance writer Jason Nark took him to “Task” in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
“Task” is peppered with Delaware County references. In Sepinwall’s opinion piece about the HBO crime drama, Nark refers to a line in the article about series creator Brad Ingelsby, who “transports us to a downtrodden stretch of rural America …”
“Downtrodden? Parts of it, perhaps. But I mean Villanova University, Swarthmore, and Haverford are in Delco, along with Neumann University, where the show filmed some scenes,” Nark wrote.
Delaware County had 54 working farms in 2022, according to the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, he wrote.
Chester County had 1,558, and Lancaster County had 4,680.
The Center for Rural Pennsylvania does not consider Delco’s 49 municipalities rural based on population density, Nark added.
Nark does feel that Ingelsby presented Delaware County as more rural than it is.
“I’ve covered the kind of places you’d see in “Task,” not quite rural or urban or even suburban, the in-between towns haunted by better days. Many of those towns lost vital industries, the ticket to a nice middle-class life, and nothing filled the void.
”In Delco, that dream’s still possible,” Nark wrote.
Read more of Jason Nark’s observations in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
