Program Overview

Executive Producer: Tony Danza
Genres: Adaptation, Family, Fantasy

Program Synopsis

A modern retelling of Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle." In 1980 rural Oregon, Jack Epson is a nature-loving dreamer suffering from untreatable leukemia. Living in the forest surrounding Suttersville are magical spirit guides, led by Morgan Sutter, the town's founder, and Young Dog, an ancient Native American. They have chosen Jack, a political activist and deeply caring man, to become their mortal spokesman and lead the battle to save Suttersville from rampant development. They lure him into the forest and entice him to drink from a spring that causes him to sleep for 20 years. When he wakes up in the modern day, everything has changed -- his wife Annie has divorced him, his daughter Molly is grown with a child of her own, and urban development is encroaching on the wildlife that Jack loves so much. His precocious. ten-year-old grandson Sean helps Jack understand not only what's befallen him, but what he must do to prove his worth.

Jack has to take on Ted Donner, whose plans for the town are not as he'd like everyone to believe. Jack is repeatedly tested by the impossible challenges before him, but through his own genuine passion and with Sean as his resourceful and ever-optimistic sidekick, he wins back his daughter's affection and the town's respect, and even Sutter's grudging gratitude. But, most importantly, he wins back his wife. And then he has to fight for his life. One modern advance that no one regrets is a medical one, a bone marrow transplant that at least can give Jack a fighting chance. And when there's no other genetic match, Sean gets to be the hero and rescue his grandfather.

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