Rich Man, Poor Man

The overwhelming success of this star-laden TV adaptation of Irwin Shaw's 1970 best-seller that was shown as six two-hour motion pictures over a seven-week period assured the future of the "Novel for Television" miniseries genre. Stars of varying magnitudes were made of the production's three leading players -- Peter Strauss, Susan Blakely and Nick Nolte (each Emmy Award-nominated) -- as the two Jordache brothers and the girl involved at one time or another with each during the twenty years from the end of World War II until the late 1960s in this odyssey examining the shifting social and moral values in America. It also spawned a weekly series, "Rich Man, Poor Man -- Book II" (which had nothing to do with Shaw's original book), running during the 1976-77 television season with Strauss continuing his original role.

Emmy Awards were won by Edward Asner and Fionnuala Flanagan for acting, David Greene for directing (Part 8), and Alex North for his music score. Among the other nominations (twenty in all) were one for Best Limited Series as well as to Dorothy McGuire, Ray Milland, Bill Bixby, Robert Reed, Van Johnson and Norman Fell (in various specialized acting categories), director Boris Sagal (for Part 5), writer Dean Reisner, cinematographer Howard R. Schwartz, costumer Charles Waldo, and editors Douglas Stewart and Richard Bracken.