The series pilot. Max, a mouse living in a Nebraska farmhouse basement with his family, is the only survivor when the farmer living there hires an exterminator to take care of all the mice. Max leaves for Washington D.C. to go live with his cousin Berkeley, an activist mouse who still dresses like it's the 1960's. There he also meets the rest of the cast of the series - Jammett, a wisecracking rat, and his mother, Trixie. Muggle, an ex-lab rat who's had one experiment too many done on him. Moze, a roach who like all roaches lives segregated from the rats and mice. Finally, the P-Cat and VP-Cat, the rodents' new nemeses. The episode focuses on Max getting to know the other characters and his coming to terms with his family's tragic deaths.

Max's optimistic view about Washington politics gets crushed when he witnesses first hand a shady senator taking a bribe from a businessman who wants him to vote a certain way.

During a recent food raid on the White House kitchen, Max loses his hat only to have it returned to him by Moze the cockroach. Max soon learns that Moze (and all the other roaches) are not very popular among the other rodents, especially Jammett....

When a troop of Japanese dancers visits the White House, Max falls for a cute Japanese mouse named Miko who lives in the troop's luggage with her family. In the process of trying to rescue her from the P-Cat, he accidentally ""kills"" him and this dredges up all sorts of memories of his parents' deaths. To further complicate matters, Miko is leaving the next day and he wants to go back to Japan with her!

Jammett becomes a local drug dealer when he starts selling caffeine pills to a squirrel named Opie. Max despises him for this, but Max soon gets into trouble himself when some tough pill-pushers think he's the one selling to Opie and don't like others taking over their business. They overdose Max on pills in order to kill him and this greatly upsets Jammett, who also learns Opie stole all of his family's food in order to pay Jammett for the pills he got!

A couple of roaches move in upstairs with the rodents and no one is happy, but Max and Berkeley convince the others to let them stay. They soon question that decision, however, when the roaches start multiplying and the entire upstairs becomes covered in wall-to-wall baby roaches!