Yuichiro wants to be an film director but his widowed mother wants him to become a doctor. As radiation leaks permeate the city, he tries to clear his debts by signing up for a dangerous medical experiment...

A man comes home to find a mysterious box on his living room floor.

The show deals with how the various states of the United States established their borders, but also delves into other aspects of U.S. history, including failed states, proposed new states, and the local culture and character of various U.S. states. It thus deals with the "shapes" of the states in a metaphorical sense as well as a literal sense. The show format follows Unger as he travels to various locations, and interviews local people, visits important historical and cultural sites, and provides commentary from behind the wheel of his car as he drives from location to location. Interspersed with these segments are brief historical synopses by notable U.S. historians.

In Uzbekistan, the government has started its own war on terror. A war that – like so many others – is waged for political reasons, which rarely have anything to do with reality. As a result, thousands of Muslims are imprisoned on false charges of conspiring to commit terrorist crimes. One of them is the human rights activist Dilya's brother Iskandar, who has been imprisoned in the notorious Jaslyk prison in a barren desert since 2002 – an inhumane place of which there are no images. Today, she lives in exile in Sweden because of the threats and harassment, but Dilya continues to fight the case of her brother and other prisoners with the help of Amnesty International.

On January 20, 1981, 52 members of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran were released after 444 days of captivity. Told by those who lived through it, a crisis that traumatized America and upset the political balance in the Middle East.