Frannie Vaughn (Fawcett) comes back home after being away a long time, only to find that her mother has died. She also finds out that her sister, Natalie (Crow) and her husband, Jake (Bryce), are planning to sell the acres once owned by Frannie and Natalie's family. To buy the land back from her sister, Frannie gets a job and falls in love with a fellow worker, Rubin (Johnson). In the end, Frannie's dreams come true and Natalie comes to her senses and moves in to the old family house with Frannie and Rubin.

The Herlihys are a working class family from Chicago whose three children take wildly divergent paths: Brian joins the Marines right out of High School and goes to Vietnam, Michael becomes involved in the civil rights movement and after campaigning for Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy becomes involved in radical politics, and Katie gets pregnant, moves to San Francisco and joins a hippie commune. Meanwhile, the Taylors are an African-American family living in the deep South. When Willie Taylor, a minister and civil rights organizer, is shot to death, his son Emmet moves to the city and eventually joins the Black Panthers, serving as a bodyguard for Fred Hampton.

Monster Squad is a television series that aired Saturday mornings on NBC from 1976-1977 that is unrelated to the later movie of the same name. The series stars Fred Grandy as Walt, a criminology student working as a night watchman at "Fred's Wax Museum". To pass the time, Walt built a prototype "Crime Computer" hidden in a large stone sarcophagus near an exhibit of legendary monsters. When Walt plugged in his computer, "oscillating vibrations" brought to life the wax statues of Dracula, the Wolfman who here was named "Bruce W. Wolf", and Frankenstein's Monster who was referred to as "Frank N. Stein" in the credits. The monsters, wanting to make up for the misdeeds of their pasts, became superhero crimefighters who used their unique abilities to challenge and defeat various supervillains. In most episodes, Walt would send the monsters out to investigate crimes and fight the villains while monitoring the activities from the wax museum via the Crime Computer, presumably because his job required him to be at the wax museum at all times. However, Walt would sometimes join the climactic battle with his comrades in some episodes and come to the rescue when needed.