Episode 1

Darren Treacy comes back to Dublin for a weekend and spends it burying his brother. He has lived in Spain for a year, since a gun was found in his house, and he has come home for the party that will mark Robbie's release from prison. The party never happens. Tommy, who was meant to collect Robbie from the gate, is delayed because he is sleeping with Darren's sister, Mary, and while Robbie waits at a newsagent he is shot from a passing car. Darren reaches the scene too late and finds him dead.

The killing is the pilot's method in miniature. Robbie has barely been introduced when the series kills him, and the episode does not name his killer. That is withholding by design rather than a gap in the record: the man who fired the shot is identified in episode 3, and no source consulted names him here. What the pilot offers instead of an investigation is the criminals' ordinary lives. There is no detective and no case, and the tension comes from who owes what.

Nidge, Robbie's closest friend, has just bought a gun and is teaching himself to use it from an online instructional video. Darren is re-arrested on the firearms charge that drove him abroad, and John Boy Power, the gang's boss, pays for a solicitor. The charges are thrown out on a technicality. The act that frees Darren is also the act that binds him to the gang, and it is the debt the rest of the series runs on.

Two relationships are set out and left open. Darren's former girlfriend Rosie is pregnant by Stumpy, and the triangle around her is established without being resolved. Mary's grief turns religious: she has Mass cards printed and fingers a scapular while the body lies in an open coffin in the parlour. Darren cannot share any of it, and the episode's clearest character work is the distance between the two of them. It ends with him set on revenge.

As an opening, the first movement is the strongest thing in the hour. A character is released, killed and buried inside the episode, and the motive is saved for later, so the audience learns what to expect from the show before it learns who did it. The debt economy does the work a police procedural would otherwise have to do.

The weaknesses were noticed at the time. The Irish Times found the funeral so drawn out that it reached for the word funereal as shorthand for a slow, dull pace, and complained that there was not enough business. The Irish Post, reviewing the later Channel 5 showing, called the episode predictable and somewhat clichéd and the Nidge and Trish material thinly written.

Where the pilot sits in the run is now clear. Every organising device of Love/Hate is present: the gang as a workplace, a boss who keeps himself a step away from violence, domestic comedy alongside it, and a sympathetic lead who will be compromised within the week. It is the record that shows the show's method cleanly, and the one its own makers treat as the opening that set the tone.