Each season is a separate crime story set in the snowy upper Midwest, mostly Minnesota, in the world of the Coen brothers' 1996 film, with a new cast and period. In the first, set in 2006, a drifting killer stirs a put-upon insurance salesman to murder; in the second, set in 1979, a hit-and-run tangles a small-town couple with a crime family and the state police.