Since the first episode aired back on March 26 of 1973 the two central families, the Brooks and the Fosters had been butting heads in Genoa City, Wisconsin. The Brooks family, you see, are wealthy and prosperous with all the usual baggage that comes with that territory. On the other hand the Foster family remains poor and while they may not exactly pass for "trailer trash" they do manage to act like it. As the years went by however, the central characters left for various reasons so were replaced by two new "core" families, the Abbotts and the Williams. The show also went from a one half hour per day "soap" to an hour long "soap opera" in back 1980. Two of the central characters have remained, to this day, rivals and star performers. Both Katherine Chancellor and Jill Foster Abbott have been involved in many plot twists and turns over the past nearly forty years of the long running soap's history. Major story lines have included sexual relationships involving an early introduction into premarital sexual intercourse, lesbianism, incest, impotence, rape, and even breast cancer, bulimia, and alcoholism, just your basic human frailties and diseases.

Brothers & Sisters was an American television drama series that aired on ABC from 2006 to 2011. The show followed the lives of the Walker family, who run a successful business in Los Angeles. The main characters were the five adult Walker siblings and their parents. The show explored their relationships, careers, and personal struggles.

4 Blocks is a German TV series that follows the story of a Lebanese family living in Berlin. The show premiered in 2017 and ran for three seasons, ending in 2019. It revolves around Ali "Toni" Hamady, who attempts to leave his criminal past behind and start a legitimate business, but his efforts are hindered by his brother's recklessness and a rival gang's thirst for power.

Officer Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) works for the CIA and as an operative strives to keep this country safe from another attack such as the one occurring in September 11, 2001. Her latest assignment involves finding a Marine Corp member, Sergeant Nicholas Brody. He was captured in 2003 and considered to be missing in action, but was later found to be held by Al-Qaeda until recently. There is danger that he was "turned" by the enemy and now may pose tremendous risk to our nations security. When Officer Mathison is put on probation due to conducting some unauthorized operations while in Iraq, she finds herself reassigned to Langley, VA and a CIA counter terrorism center. In other words, a desk job. While in Iraq Mathison learned of a prisoner from America there who had become corrupt. Now the CIA superiors of Mathison consider the prisoner Brody to be somewhat of a hero. Claire Danes (My So-Called Life, Temple Grandin) is Officer Carrie Mathison who is employed by the CIA in counter intelligence. Nicholas Brody is played by Damian Lewis (The Forsyte Saga, Band of Brothers), rescued after eight years as a POW. The CIA Division Chief of the Middle East and Carrie Mathison's mentor and former boss is Saul Berenson played by Mandy Patinkin (Chicago Hope, Dead Like Me). Cast is tremendous and story is fresh, up to date, and somewhat disturbing.

One of two intense medical dramas NBC introduced in the fall of 2009, "Mercy" had all the advantages its one-named rival "Trauma" did not. First, it had talent behind the scenes. Liz Heldens from "Friday Night Lights" created the show and led the writers, proving once again that the best way to dramatize the real world is to show it realistically"”ugliness and all. Second, it had attitude and guts to stay true to its revolutionary premise, the well-informed notion "that nurses remain [not only] more generous caregivers, but that they are more intuitively apt, smarter, more committed and as technically able as their [physician] superiors, with none of the accompanying arrogance." In a winner-take-all ER smackdown, you always would go all-in with the Mercy Hospital nurses. The main character, nurse Veronica Flanagan Callahan, has just returned from a tour in Iraq, where she clearly learned more in each day than the pompous, presumptuous doctors learned in all five years of medical school. Of course, Veronica gets neither the respect nor the reward she deserves, but "Mercy" dangles the possibility of true love as just recompense for Veronica's skill and compassion. Taylor Schilling plays Veronica with exactly the right balance of toughness and vulnerability, skillfully juxtaposing her consummate skill as a nurse with her intrepid ingenuousness in matters of the heart. If only "Mercy" had survived into a second season, all the tangled threads in the story might have come to their proper denouement. If only.

Very self absorbed, as are many surgeons, Dr. Michael Holt begins to question just what his purpose in life actually is when he starts "seeing" his wife again. The problem is that she is deceased. The degree of self confidence found in Holt and many other surgeons is a necessary part of the talent they must possess but the good doctor now doubts his sanity when the spirit of his ex-wife, who recently died in a car accident, begins appearing to him. Anna returns to convince Dr. Holt to keep a free clinic running. She had been the director of that clinic and was involved with many poverty level patients. Michael Holt however, is not so sure he can deal with the poorer patients as he's not used to that type of people. But there is no room for snobbishness in the medical field and the spirit of his diseased wife is there to see he learns that. Anna's sister Christina is a believer in supernatural events and is happy that her sister is back in Holt's life because she feels the doctor was a better person when his dead was with him. Patrick Wilson (The A-Team, Insidious) plays Dr. Michael Holt, Jennifer Ehle (Contagion, The King's Speech) is Anna Holt, and Christina is played by Julie Benz (Saw V, Punisher: War Zone).