The series stars Missy Peregrym, Zeeko Zaki, Jeremy Sisto, Ebonée Noel, and Sela Ward and centers on inner workings of the New York office criminal division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
[3] When an apartment building is destroyed by two bomb blasts, killing 27 people including a young African-American boy, it first appears to be part of a gang war.
However, further investigation reveals that the mastermind behind the carnage is a white supremacist named Robert Lawrence who wants to create the illusion that groups of non-white people are turning the city of New York into a war zone.
As Maggie, OA and the rest of the FBI's New York field office meet their new boss, Special Agent in Charge Dana Mosier who's a former profiler with the BAU, they quickly locate the store and find CCTV footage showing a young woman spraying poison onto the food.
Tracking through her computer, the team finds that she has been attracted to a radical form of Islam and duped into undertaking the terrorist attack.
One of her online friends is also being lined up for the same treatment with OA soon realizing the girls were in fact working with ISIS and also a terrorist whose methods he encountered during his time in the Army.
The dead man had been turned by members of another branch of the FBI and was going to help take down Martin Vickers, who is selling 50 new generation shoulder-mounted, laser-guided anti-tank missiles that could be used to shoot down planes.
When ICE deportation officer Thomas Gilman kills his family consisting of his wife and two children and flees, the resulting explosion destroying his house while leaving one neighbor dead and two in the ICU, O.A.
The FBI connect Sanchez to a Mexican drug cartel, and later the company Perez worked for, as a front for money laundering.
With Keller giving up information on the cartel, Bell finally gets closure for Jason's death while Mosier confides in Jubal and announces that she will be retiring as special-agent-in-charge, having already submitted her retirement papers after realizing her decision to let Maggie proceed could have cost Maggie her career or worse while noting that for the first time in her career, she made a decision based on feelings, not logic and empathy, not protocol.
Wolf's original plan was to introduce it on the NBC network as a planned spin-off to his New York crime drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, where it was intended to introduce an FBI agent character, but NBC ultimately did not go through with it and the idea was later put on hold for different reasons.
[4] The FBI Special Agent in Charge in the first episode ("Pilot") was Ellen Solberg, played by Connie Nielsen.
The website's critical consensus reads, "Dick Wolf's new series sports a compelling cast and adrenaline-spiking spectacle, although some viewers may find this retread of the mega-producer's previous procedural formulas overly familiar.