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Little Hope, New Hampshire. Pretty, angel-faced Suzanne Stone wants only one thing and that's to be in TV, because ‘unless you're on TV you're no-one in America’. She marries a man who will do anything to please her, indeed who with self-prophetic irony announces with the gift of lap-dog Walter that he will ‘die for her love’. Using her honeymoon to get access to a conference of the major TV networks, Suzanne then dons a designer suit, an attaché case and a French twist hairstyle as props to convince slow-moving, local cable-TV chief Ed Grant to give her a job at the station. In no time she has persuaded him to let her do the weather reports and, keen to get more projects off the ground, she starts visiting a local school to make a documentary on the aspirations of the local youth. There she meets poor, white, disaffected no-hopers, Jamie, Lydia and Russell.
Meanwhile husband Larry Marretto, whose Italian parents run a successful restaurant, is becoming dangerously keen on the idea of children and ‘family life’. Career-obsessed Suzanne, perceiving the threat to her professional future, sees an opportunity to get rid of him that will leave her career path unthreatened. She seduces Jamie, dropping into the conversation that her husband beats her, draws Lydia into her confidence and elicits the information that Russell has a gun. Before long, Jamie has agreed to murder her husband and Suzanne has made sure that she has the perfect alibi, presenting the weather live on TV as the crime takes place.
The police soon track down the killers and Suzanne gives a perfect TV performance as the grieving widow. However, when police suspect a sexual relationship between her and Jamie, she has to think fast and falsely asserts, on live television, that Larry had a cocaine habit. This defamation of their son's character is too much for his parents who call in a favour from the Mafia and have Suzanne ‘taken out’.
In his paper ‘The physical, and psychological self and the development of t