by Michael Nava

In the summer of 1982, Henry Rios is a young public defender working in Linden, a small town thirty-miles south of San Francisco. Linden is home to the great university founded by railroad magnate Grover Linden at the end of the nineteenth century. Rios, who is gay and Latino, was born and raised in California’s central valley, and is from a working-class Mexican-American family. He is a graduate of Linden and its top-ranked law school. In episode 1, Rios, driven to drink by professional setbacks and personal demons, is working the jail rotation. He meets Hugh Paris, a young man the police have arrested on drug charges outside a gay bar. For both men, the encounter will be life changing.