Comedy
Small-town store owner Scattergood Baines helps a runaway boy find his father, who has escaped after being unjustly imprisoned, and a young chemist who is trying to invent a color television but is being opposed by his girlfriend's father, who wants the girl to marry a…


Scattergood Baines

Jimmy Jordan

Ruth Savage

Urban Downs

Mirandy Baines

Pliny Pickett

Ben Mott

Squire Pettibone

Clara Potts

Hipp

Ed Potts

Mrs. Downs

Young Scattergood Baines arrives in the small New England town of Coldriver. Through some shrewd business maneuvering, he manages to open up a hardware store. Twenty years later he has become a prosperous and respected member of the community, a member of the local school board and the owner of a railroad that transports timber to the local sawmill. Problems begin to arise, however, when a young schoolteacher he has hired turns out to be not quite what he expected, and the mill owners pressure Scattergood to sell them his railroad, with the idea of raising the transportation fees paid to them by the local loggers.

When Martin Knox, a friend of Scattergood's who owns a horse-breeding farm, is killed in a harness race Scattergood tells Martin's son Dan that he will send him to college if he forgets about taking over his father's business, which was heavily mortgaged and has been put up for auction after Knox's death. The boy reluctantly agrees, but when he discovers that his favorite horse Starlight is sick, he decides to bring the animal back to health and then enter him in the Governor's Race, whose $5000 prize would enable Dan to pay off his father's mortgage and keep the business in the family.

Scattergood Baines, Coldriver's most popular citizen, neighborly counselor and sly old fox, entices a Broadway producer to Coldriver to see the gay musical extravaganza Baines is staging for the benefit of the U.S.O. He is also promoting the singing career of his latest local protégé, Betty Palmer. There are a few problems but the Sage of Coldriver manages to keep pulling the right strings.

For the 1979 broadcast, Cash's annual CBS Christmas special returns to Nashville after taping the previous year's program in Los Angeles. This time he features his father, Ray Cash, and older brother Roy Cash in a visit to the small home in Dyess, Arkansas, where Johnny and his siblings were raised. Guests include Canadian pop and country star Anne Murray ("You Needed Me"), who was enjoying the most successful period of her career, and country music's Tom T. Hall, whom Cash introduces as "my very favorite songwriter" before Cash and Hall launch into a medley of Hall's hits "Old Dogs, Children And Watermelon Wine," "The Year That Clayton Delaney Died," "I Love" and "Country Is." The show's comic foil is the late Andy Kaufman, who appears as his character Latka Gravas from the hit network show Taxi.

Things seem pretty bad for a young girl living a "hard-knock life" in an orphanage. Fed up with the dastardly Miss Hannigan, Annie escapes the run-down orphanage determined to find her mom and dad. It's an adventure that takes her from the cold, mean streets of New York to the warm, comforting arms of bighearted billionaire Oliver Warbucks - with plenty of mischief and music in between.

Browning is a PI with a bad cold, who's sent to investigate a case by a mysterious client. He stumbles across the body of a young woman and is stabbed to death, and when he wakes up in heaven, they tell him he's "marginal material," and they can only decide on his final destination through one last assignment: to go back and solve his own murder. As a dog. A cute fluffy little dog (Benji). Undaunted, Browning begins to investigate the case as best he can around his canine disabilities (dialing the phone presents a special challenge) to solve the murders, save the girl, and see justice done.