Series premiere. The Line opens in a seedy motel room. Max Friel, a cop with his own agenda and a sarcastic edge, cheats on his wife with burned-out legal aid lawyer Jayne Huxley. Outside the motel, Max's slightly unhinged partner Donny Logan waits, drunk, in his car.

Max and Donny leave to watch Carlos Powell get out of jail. Carlos is a mid-level drug dealer with an anxiety problem whose veneer of toughness barely hides his crumbling confidence. Caught between warring suppliers Andre Gilbert and Eddie Tran, with a wife and daughter who seem to want nothing to do with him, Carlos is about to learn that picking up his old life won't be as easy as he thought.

Jayne asks Max to lean on Terrance, a client's boyfriend – and get him to confess to the crime her client is charged with. Max has Donny pick up Terrance, who turns out to be one of Andre's young dealers. But Donny, drunk and sloppy, forgets to search the kid.

Max takes Terrance to an abandoned field to "interrogate" him, where Max gets badly knifed by the young drug dealer and winds up killing him.