An elaborate mystery involving a famous mentalist, his unfaithful wife who is trying to literally scare him to death, the best friend of the family, and the wife's ham-actor lover -- not only an intriguing who- (or whether) dunit, but also a literate, adult dramatic puzzle with an endless series of twists.
A young neurosurgeon inherits the castle of his grandfather, the famous Dr. Victor von Frankenstein. In the castle he finds a funny hunchback, a pretty lab assistant and the elderly housekeeper. Young Frankenstein believes that the work of his grandfather was delusional, but when he discovers the book where the mad doctor described his reanimation experiment, he suddenly changes his mind.
Some college students manage to persuade the town's big businessman, A. J. Arno, to donate a computer to their college. When the problem- student, Dexter Riley, tries to fix the computer, he gets an electric shock and his brain turns to a computer; now he remembers everything he reads. Unfortunately, he also remembers information which was in the computer's memory, like Arno's illegal businesses..
Banker Roger Hobbs wants to spend his vacation alone with his wife, Peggy, but she insists on a family vacation at a California beach house that turns out to be ugly and broken down. Daughter Katey, embarrassed by her braces, refuses to go to the beach, as does TV-addicted son Danny. When the family is joined by Hobbs' two unhappily married daughters and their husbands, he must help everyone with their problems to get some peace.
Ella Peterson works in the basement office of Susanswerphone, a telephone answering service. She listens in on others' lives and adds some interest to her own humdrum existence by adopting different identities for her clients. They include an out-of-work Method actor, a dentist with musical yearnings, and in particular playwright Jeffrey Moss, who is suffering from writer's block and desperately needs a muse.
In 1940s New York, a white widow who dreams of being on Broadway has a chance encounter with a black single mother, who becomes her maid.
While working as a counselor at a summer camp, college-student Marjorie Morgenstern falls for 32-year-old Noel Airman, a would-be dramatist working at a nearby summer theater. Like Marjorie, he is an upper-middle-class New York Jew, but has fallen away from his roots, and Marjorie's parents object among other things to his lack of a suitable profession. Noel himself warns Marjorie repeatedly that she's much too naive and conventional for him, but they nonetheless fall in love.