That applies equally to the drug dealers Max and Donny encounter. "We show how hard it is to make a life that way. It's not as easy to make a living at it as people think," Romain claimed.
By focusing on the characters and their lives on and off the job, The Line stays away from the familiar crime procedural model. "The great thing about working with The Movie Network and Movie Central is they don't do conventional television, so as a writer you're not bound by conventional constructs," said Romain. "You have absolute freedom where you can write a story about the characters and have them carry you forward. Basically what we've done is a 15-episode novel."
The distributor wanted an American presence in the series, so Ed Asner, Linda Hamilton, and Sharon Lawrence are part of the large ensemble cast, which also includes Cle Bennett, Wes "Maestro" Williams, and Sarah Manninen.
Walker compares the tone with shows like Deadwood, The Sopranos, and Dexter, pointing out that television has recently begun to embrace the "contemporary philosophy" that comedy and drama should be mixed, and in fact stem from the same place.
And even if there's no overt message to The Line, no clear-cut good guys to root for and bad guys to despise, Walker believes their goal as writers is to allow the audience to find "little truths about the world in which we live and the characters and the people who live in it. Not monumental truths, but day-to-day truths about how they feel or what they're worried about or how they behave - sometimes really well, and sometimes extraordinarily badly."
The Line premieres Monday, March 16 at 1 pm ET on The Movie Network and 9 pm PT on Movie Central.
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