Jefferson City, Missouri: Joseph Randolph, a VIP in a fictional electronics company, has just gotten the sack. The company bigwigs insist it is simply because of downsizing, but Randolph is not buying it. Enraged, he gets a handgun and shoots five managers to death. Then he turns himself in and is eventually put in a psychiatric hospital by the police. His family suffers a series of tragedies that leave only his daughter to wonder about why her father was committed to an institution. She joins with a visiting reporter from Chicago and another interested man, and all three start digging deeper into the company's history.

Desperate for a job to help him support his family, Jim Norman takes a position teaching high school in the town where his brother was murdered in front of him by teenage bullies twenty-seven years before. The teens who committed the crime are long dead, but now the kids in Jim's new class keep dying and being replaced by new students who look like the deceased hoodlums.

April has a problem. Whenever she gets anything like passionate with a guy all sorts of things seem to spontaneously combust. The only men she meets more then once are firefighters. Actually, it's Mom's way of trying to keep her little girl to herself, but new boyfriend Andy is having none of such nonsense. So the heat's on. Unfortunately it's Fluffy the cat who keeps getting caught in the middle.

A grandfather shares two Christmas stories with his grandchildren: "Thieves' Christmas," a story about a band of thugs who learn the value of the holiday season, and "The Gift," in which a young shepherd overcomes adversity to witness the birth of Jesus.

This is the story of a minister who's feeling unhappy in his marriage who then has an affair with a church employee, who is also married, and who also has affairs, and whose husband is unwilling to divorce her. One day the minister's wife is found dead, in what appears to be an auto accident, but the highway patrolman who investigated the accident doesn't think that it's an accident but doesn't have enough evidence to justify an investigation. Later, when the woman's husband is killed an investigation begins.