A dramatic feature from Cine Manifest, Over-Under, Sideways-Down explores the politics of everyday life in America. The film centers on a working-class couple, Roy and Jan Stennis (played by Robert Viharo and Sharon Goldman), who live, with their two children, in a cramped tract home. An assembly line worker in a steel plant, Roy entertains the escapist fantasy of moving from the local semi-pro baseball team for which he plays third base, to the big leagues. "It's just a matter of being in the right place at the right time," he figures. However, when Roy simultaneously loses his job (by being at the right place at the right time - coming to the defense of a black co-worker and thus being branded a trouble-maker) and his one chance to impress an interested baseball scout, his life begins to unravel. The strains on his marriage increase, intensified by Jan's decision to take a job, and Roy begins to isolate himself both from his family and his fellow workers.

Although Dave (LeVar Burton) and his family are poor sharecroppers in the Deep South in the 1930s, this 15-year-old's problem is shared by teenagers today: he stands with one foot in adulthood and the other in childhood. "Almos' A Man", yet still treated like a child, he struggles for an identity. There's one thing, one symbol of manhood, Dave thinks, that could guarantee him instant respect: a gun.

Barney Miller is an American situation comedy television series set in a New York City police station in Greenwich Village. The series originally was broadcast from January 23, 1975 to May 20, 1982 on ABC. It was created by Danny Arnold and Theodore J. Flicker. Noam Pitlik directed the majority of the episodes.