Episode 1

The episode opens with a killing it then refuses to explain. A young man collects a paper bag of sweets, rides pillion through Dublin, masks up at a stop and shoots a man standing beside a car. Recap accounts name the gunman as Glen Wright; no source consulted names the victim, and the episode lets the shooting sit unexplained until the story catches up to it. The rewind lands on a different scene: Michael Kinsella, home from prison to a party of applause and embraces, walking into a Dublin 4 house beside the Aviva Stadium.

The Kinsellas are established as a business before they are established as a family. Amanda, Jimmy's wife, snorts cocaine before joining the party, scolds Eric for taking drugs in the kitchen and steers her son Jamie away from drink. She tells Jamie his school has lifted his expulsion and offers him a choice between finishing his CAO application and working with her at the family's car dealership, Kingsford Motors; he chooses the application. Michael asks Frank for legitimate work so that he can apply to see his daughter Anna, and is allowed to wash cars at the dealership. He cannot see Anna because he was responsible for the death of her mother, and he watches her secretly from a café.

Frank's authority is the episode's other subject, and the meeting with Eamon Cunningham takes it away. Eamon says he is Caolán Moore's only supplier and wants to be the Kinsellas' only supplier too; Frank, who says his crew moves more of Eamon's product than anyone else, agrees to increase Eamon's cut by 35 per cent. Eric reacts badly, calls his father weak, is called an embarrassment in return, and confronts Caolán, who refuses to fight. Eric then carries out a drive-by into a crowd of Caolán's people, and Caolán reports it to Eamon, who gives him permission to take care of Eric.

Michael keeps to the terms set for him, watching Anna from a distance while Jimmy takes Jamie on a debt collection and burns Keith Boylan on the face with a hot iron to show his son what the family business is. Amanda finds Jamie has not finished his CAO application and Jimmy tells her Jamie is his son and it is not her decision alone. Two detectives, Paul Breslin and Jacinta O'Connor, call at Eric's door to warn him that a threat may have been made to his life.

The resolution arrives where the family keeps its children. Jamie shows Amanda his completed CAO application and drives Michael to the gym. In the car park Jamie notices Eric's flat tyre; Michael finds a nail in it, and Eric suggests it was deliberate. Gunmen open fire. Eric is hit, Michael tries to staunch the bleeding, and then realises Jamie has also been shot. Jamie is dead. The episode ends on Michael panicking in the car park.

That closing ambush is the strongest single decision in the hour, placed at the far end of an episode spent establishing that the family's business and its children cannot be kept apart. The weakness is the talk that carries the plot there: American notices found the pilot's dialogue melodramatic, with lines people do not speak, and one recap judged the opening a confusing jumble that needed rewinding.

What distinguishes it is the setting, a Dublin crime family whose home sits beside the Aviva Stadium and whose front is a beauty salon rather than the housing-estate criminality of earlier Irish shows. It is the entry point to the whole run and the first appearance of the Cox and Dunne partnership that carries the show. Amanda is left on the sideline here; the later episodes move her.