Lou Grant

Rossi meets a woman who is still trying to solve the hit-and-run death of her son two years ago, and is so impressed by her determination that he ignores his regular assignments to help her.

After Animal risks his life to get a photograph, Lou discovers that he is a Vietnam veteran who is still haunted by his experiences. Lou commissions more stories about the difficulties faced by Vietnam vets, and tries to get Mrs. Pynchon to reach out to hire more of them at the paper.

A friend of Lou's angers the fire department by revealing information from an internal investigation that a series of fires are being set by an arson-for-profit gang that includes two officials. One of the fires occurs at Animal's apartment building.

A visit from Lou's daughter Ellen reveals that she is in denial about her son's progressive deafness. Meanwhile, Rossi is disgruntled about being told that his story about faulty building construction doesn't have enough documentation, and he gets in trouble by giving the story to a rival reporter.

Lou takes an instant dislike to a new media consultant who wants the Tribune to do more "sexy" stories in an attempt to widen the paper's audience. The reporters investigate various dating services, but the young man Billie meets refuses to leave her alone.

While on vacation, fishing with an old friend who now runs a small-town newspaper, Lou helps expose the cause of a mysterious illness plaguing the area's cattle, but a quarantine could ruin many of the local farmers.

Visiting a school guidance counselor to help pick a group of Tribune scholarship winners, Lou learns about the eruption of violence in such inner-city schools, but is shocked when she is beaten and raped by two students. Billie and Rossi work on a background story.

Donovan refuses to accept the fact that his terminally ill mother is dying. Meanwhile Lou sends Rossi to do a story on a rich woman who takes out an ad in the Trib, advertising for a husband; and Charlie sells his used car to Animal.

Billie gets upset when her story of the murder of an 'ordinary' African American mother gets buried on page 26 opposite the shipping news, while Rossi's upbeat feel-good story of an elderly white lady who beat up some attackers gets front page treatment.

When Lou and Rossi visit a resort to set up the newspaper staff's annual tennis tournament, they discover that it is a mob haven heavily populated by organized crime figures, as well as a Senate candidate.

Lou is feeling unusually tired as he helps a copy boy who is trying to become a reporter, and has to fire a promising intern who impishly inserted a fake award into a list of awards. Then a routine checkup reveals that Lou has cancer of the thyroid, which requires immediate surgery.

When the Trib receives a request from the CIA to stop investigating two young men arrested for drug dealing, the staff comes to suspect that there is a CIA informant in their midst.

Because of his disrespectful attitude toward a city supervisor, Rossi is pulled from covering the man's re-election campaign and replaced by a female reporter. But when she comes up with scoops, Rossi suspects that she has become romantically involved with the politician she is supposed to be covering.

Charlie Hume and his wife are upset about their son Tommy's conversion to the Hare Krishna religion, but have second thoughts after hiring a "de-programmer" to kidnap him. Meanwhile, Rossi and Billie do a story on such religious cults.

When a gubernatorial candidate is saved from an assassination attempt by an anonymous bystander, Rossi identifies the man and writes a story about him that reveals a hidden conviction for armed robbery in his past. This causes the hero to lose business clients, as well as his girlfriend. Meanwhile, Billie's story on a struggling halfway house for women newly released from prison gains sympathy from Mrs. Pynchon.

Billie's holiday assignment to profile a needy family leads to an oupouring of sympathy and monetary support, whereas Rossi's assignment leads him to discover that an uninteresting official is a bigamist supporting two separate families.