40-year-old Arnold Gardner is put in charge of the talk show "The Twenty-fifth Hour" after the death of the former host Duncan Mackay. His role on screen creates immediate interest and the program becomes a great success with TV audiences. This proves to be a period of great satisfaction for Arnold, but his childhood friend, Eddie Greenberg, suddenly comes on the scene. Eddie is ill and frustrated by lack of success, and is so resentful and envious of Arnold's fame that he wants him to make a full public confession of a "sin" he committed in his young days.

Marco, a television journalist, reads "red lies" on his teletext system in order to gather material on the homosexual world for a story he's working on. Unfortunately, he is implicated in a series of murders in which the victims are all gay. Marco becomes a suspect and is forced to investigate the crimes himself in order to prove his innocence.