Synopsis
At a wholesome fifties-style burger stand in the Salt Lake suburbs, a nineteen-year-old cartel assassin named Antonia watches a Mormon teenager in a letter jacket calmly swap cars in the parking lot. Nothing about this place is what it looks like. That's the show.
Marti Wheeler is nobody's idea of a detective: a Mormon single mother of four with three failed marriages who photographs adulterers for a small PI agency, often with her four-year-old riding shotgun as cover, because childcare is expensive and a mom with a toddler is invisible. Her oldest, fifteen and partially deaf, reads lips across crowded rooms, a skill that will matter. Raised by a secretive ex-FBI father who now lives, estranged, in a trailer in her backyard, Marti carries an unappeasable need to know the truth about everyone, it turns out, except herself.
A routine asset-verification job takes her to Bliss, Utah, a postcard town of hand-painted storefronts and CASH ONLY signs. When her client abruptly kills the job, Marti keeps digging anyway. The town's credit union is washing cartel money, run by Benji Hartwell, the earnest, devout bishop and mayor who will do anything to build his town a temple. Behind him stands Israel Campos: family man, youth soccer coach, and the Sinaloa cartel's head of distribution for the Northwestern United States. Between them moves Antonia, who kills whoever she's told to until the cartel returns her young son.
Season one tightens the net: a laundering pipeline running south to a Mormon colony in Sonora, Mexico; a gang turf war bleeding into Salt Lake; corrupt threads inside the local police and the FBI; and a vendetta from her father's buried past that finally answers the question Marti has been asking her whole life, and forces the choice he faced twenty years earlier: the truth, or her family.
The question
How far will Marti go to uncover the truth before her need to know endangers the family she is trying to protect?
Tone
In the vein of Breaking Bad and Fargo, with the investigative dread of True Detective. Serious in intent, eccentric in texture, set in a world where killers and saints attend the same potlucks. One case per season.