When an injury ends his amateur boxing career, Stuart Long moves to Los Angeles to find money and fame. While scraping by as a supermarket clerk, he meets Carmen, a Sunday school teacher who seems immune to his bad-boy charm. Determined to win her over, the longtime agnostic starts going to church to impress her. However, a motorcycle accident leaves him wondering if he can use his second chance to help others, leading to the surprising realization...

In his quest to build a drug empire in the 1980s, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo takes the helm of the Guadalajara Cartel, unifying traffickers. Meanwhile, DEA Agent Kiki Camarena moves his wife and young son from California to Guadalajara to take on a new post. As Camarena gathers intelligence on Félix and becomes more entangled in his mission, a tragic chain of events unfolds, affecting the drug trade, and the war against it, for years to come.