Willie Stark is an uncorrupted small-town mayor in 1950s Louisiana. He gets picked by the political machine to run as a wild card candidate in the upcoming gubernatorial race. But, when Willie realizes that he is being manipulated, he veers off on his own to become the darling of the electorate's downtrodden and forgotten hicks. Covering the campaign for a local paper is Jack Burden, whose editorial pieces become so admiring of Willie that he's fired....

Inspired by a true story, tells the tragic, unlikely tale of Jean Harris who made headlines in the early 1980s after shooting and killing her lover, the celebrated "Scarsdale diet doctor," Herman Tarnower, at his home in surburban New York.

The true story of Port Authority policemen John McLoughlin and William J. Jimeno, who volunteered for rescue duty and became trapped in the rubble of the Towers on September 11, 2001. The men became two of the last survivors extracted from Ground Zero. It is a story of the true heroes and of that fateful time in United States history, when buildings would fall and heroes would rise, literally from the ashes to inspire the entire human race.

Three sisters living in a college town struggle with the death of their father, while trying to reconcile relationships in their own lives.

Nine women each face a different situation in their lives. Among the stories told by director Rodrigo Garcia are a female inmate waiting for her children's visit, a woman facing cancer surgery, and a woman reuniting with an old flame at the supermarket.

Jake Huard, a local kid, is a shipbuilder's son who wants to prove to his father, not to mention himself, that he can cut it as a Naval officer. But at the Academy he runs afoul of a hard-nosed training officer named Cole who does all he can to drive Huard out of the school. They end up settling their differences in the boxing ring during the Academy's annual competition.

Actress Reese Holden has been offered a small fortune by a book editor if she can secure for publication the love letters that her father, a reclusive novelist, wrote to her mother, who has since passed away. Returning to Michigan, Reese finds that an ex-grad student and a would-be musician have moved in with her father, who cares more about his new friends than he does about his own health and well-being.

Irene is a working-class mother struggling to keep her marriage together while keeping her cocaine habit a secret. While in rehab she falls in love with a fellow addict, but when one of them relapses, their commitment to each other and sobriety shatters.

The presidential race is on, with Senator Arnold Vinick as the Republican frontrunner and Matthew Santos vying for the hotly contested Democratic presidential nomination.

This drama centers on Hank Chinaski, the fictional alter-ego of author Charles Bukowski, who wanders around Los Angeles, trying to live off jobs which don't interfere with his primary interest, which is writing.