Chuck Noland, a top international manager for FedEx, and Kelly, a Ph.D. student, are in love and heading towards marriage. Then Chuck's plane to Malaysia crashes at sea during a terrible storm. He's the only survivor, and finds himself marooned on a desolate island. With no way to escape, Chuck must find ways to survive in his new home.

After Silvia Broome, an interpreter at United Nations headquarters, overhears plans of an assassination, an American Secret Service agent is sent to investigate.

A pair of taxi-driving NYC detectives take up the case of tourists who are robbed of their money and luggage by a shady limo driver. Things get dicey when the tourists accidentally get mixed up in a drug dealer's murder and money heist, while the detectives go after a hit man posing as a friend from the `hood'.

Long separated from his family, hitman Joshua returns to Brighton Beach for a contract killing for the Russian Mafia. His abusive father, Arkady, banned him from returning after Joshua committed his first murder. He takes up residence in a hotel, and soon everyone knows he has returned. He goes home to visit his dying mother, Irina, and prepares for the assassination, getting drawn back into the criminal community he left behind.

The lives of diverse characters in each of New York City's five boroughs overlap.

Once called "Father Frank" for his efforts to rescue lives, Frank Pierce sees the ghosts of those he failed to save around every turn. He has tried everything he can to get fired, calling in sick, delaying taking calls where he might have to face one more victim he couldn't help, yet cannot quit the job on his own.

Somewhere behind the early 1960s cold-war iron curtain, the Hollander family cause an international spying incident when Walter photographs a sunset in a sensitive region. In order to stay out of jail, the Hollanders take refuge in the American Embassy, which is temporarily being run by the absent Ambassador's diplomatically incompetent son, Axel.

On New Year's Eve 1999, as a group of neurotic characters gather at a Greenwich Village apartment, everyone struggles to come to terms with their identities, relationships, and self-doubts before the millennium turns.

When a single, unattributed missile is launched at the United States, a race begins to determine who is responsible and how to respond.