American Playhouse - Season 2

First aired: 1/18/1983 12 episodes

Episodes

1. The Skin of Our Teeth

Aired: 1/18/1983

The Antrobus family and their housekeeper Lilly Sabina face various global disasters, including a new ice age, a great flood, and a devastating war.

2. Miss Lonelyhearts

Aired: 1/25/1983

A young Depression-era reporter is assigned to write his newspaper's advice column on the insistence of his mocking editor. Unhappy in the demeaning assignment, he begins to take an interest in one of the readers sending letters.

3. Family Business

Aired: 2/1/1983

Isaiah Stern is a wealthy, but dying, toy manufacturer. Once more, Stern has gathered his grown sons to revise his will. Three of the four are used to these idiosyncratic changes, and have come to accept them: however, the fourth, a married psychologist, is heavily in debt and doesn't like his thin share, which sparks a confrontation. The remaining sons are a bachelor who runs the family store, an indecisive sort who still lives at home, and Daddy's favorite, a closet homosexual.

4. Keeping On

Aired: 2/8/1983

A low-key drama exploring the struggles of an impoverished sharecropping family in the rural South with themes of Southern identity, morality, and family.

5. The File on Jill Hatch (1)

Aired: 2/15/1983

A decade-spanning look at marriage of a Black American soldier and a white British woman.

6. The File on Jill Hatch (2)

Aired: 2/22/1983

A decade-spanning look at marriage of a Black American soldier and a white British woman.

7. The File on Jill Hatch (3)

Aired: 3/1/1983

A decade-spanning look at marriage of a Black American soldier and a white British woman.

8. For Us, the Living: The Medgar Evers Story

Aired: 3/22/1983

During the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi, Medgar Evers rose from insurance agent to one of the most integral activists of the era. From boycotting white merchants in the mid-'50s to being a key figure in desegregating the University of Mississippi in 1962, Evers met success, and with it, many enemies. When racists swarm his house, his life and the lives of his wife and children are threatened.

9. Verse Person Singular

Aired: 3/29/1983

Actor Richard Kiley takes on the personae of thirteen different characters as he reads his favorite poems written in the first-person.

10. Until She Talks

Aired: 4/5/1983

The story of a young woman imprisoned for declining to testify before a grand jury; comprised from real courtroom transcripts and based on the experiences of individuals jailed for their refusal to testify.

11. Wings

Aired: 4/26/1983

Former aviatrix Emily Stilson suffers a stroke and is plunged into a world of disorientation and grief. Memories flood in between painful attempts to re-learn the basic functions of everyday life.

12. The Rothko Conspiracy

Aired: 5/3/1983

A dramatization of the fight over the estate of artist Mark Rothko, who killed himself in 1970.