Johnny and Moira Rose are nouveau riche, their wealth largely from Johnny's video store empire, the second-largest in North America. With that wealth, Moira was able to put her life as a daytime soap-opera actress behind her.
As they have always led a garish life of excessive wealth, their now-adult offspring, David and Alexis, have been spoiled, not knowing anything but having whatever they wanted handed to them on a silver platter their entire lives, and not having had to work a day in their lives.
Their collective lives change when out of circumstance they end up broke except for the one asset Johnny bought for David years earlier as a joke: a small backwater town called Schitt's Creek. The Roses are forced to move there, initially living in the Schitt's Creek Motel.
The town's founding family, the Schitts, still largely control the town in their seemingly unsophisticated ways. The Roses do whatever they can to find a way back to their previous life, but in the meantime have to try to eke out a life in their new home, which is totally outside their sensibilities.