The vicious and self-destructive Crowe family drive the plot of the fifth season of this FX crime drama. Small-time crook and full-time idiot Dewey Crowe (Damon Herriman) is ecstatic when he receives a large settlement for his ill treatment at the hands of the local law enforcement, but things quickly sour when his relative Darryl Crowe Jr. (Michael Rapaport) arrives from Florida and plots to use the spoils to build a criminal empire. When Darryl teams up with Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) to traffic heroin from Mexico, Raylan (Timothy Olyphant) is set on a collision course with the entire Crowe clan. Elsewhere, Ava (Joelle Carter) must learn to survive on her own in prison.

The crime drama's third season takes on a darker and edgier tone, as it opens with the Machine missing and completely self-governed. Root (Amy Acker) has been confined to an insane asylum but is in constant contact with the Machine, while Finch (Michael Emerson) finds himself in a position where he's no longer the Machine's sole human contact. Meanwhile, Reese (Jim Caviezel) and Shaw (Sarah Shahi) continue their work preventing crimes from happening with the help of their usual NYPD contact, Det. Fusco (Kevin Chapman); and Carter (Taraji P. Henson), who has been demoted from detective to a uniformed police officer, wages a very personal war against the corrupt police organization HR. At the same time, new threats against Team Machine come to light, including Vigilance--a watchdog group committed to exposing overreaching government surveillance methods--and Decima Technologies, who tried and failed to take control of the Machine in the previous season and are now going to extreme measures to bring another surveillance system called Samaritan online.