The miniseries cast includes five Oscar winners: Henry Fonda, Patty Duke, John Houseman, Burl Ives and Celeste Holm; and three Oscar nominees: Sally Kirkland, Ann Sothern and Charles Durning.
Producer Jo Swerling Jr. remembers "We had a lovely young actress named Beverly D'Angelo doing a love scene with Harvey Jason. It was your typical TV shot across her back to Harvey as she lets the negligee drop to the ground, and she's standing there naked. Then we did closeups of Harvey, and then of Beverly. And in Beverly's closeup we put a TV matte on the lens so that our matted field of vision would cut just at the nipple line; that was it was obvious that she was nude, but you didn't see any nipple. However, when the show was telecast, there were in the new TV sets variances in the field of vision, and half the sets in the country saw more of Beverly than the other half. The following morning, we got a panic call from Broadcast Standards that we had violated the nudity ban and that more people saw Beverly's nipples than didn't. But nobody complained. Nobody but the censors. The upshot was that we were told not to cut it that close in the future."
The story follows an Irish immigrant's rise from poverty to power. Though set a generation earlier, it is obviously inspired by the Kennedy clan with Joseph Francis Xavier Armagh [Richard Jordan] in the role of clan patriarch Joeseph Kennedy. Some of the parallels include Armagh as a blockade runner during the Civil War - Kennedy was reputed to be a rum-runner. Armagh married a senator's daughter - Kennedy married a Boston mayor's daughter. Armagh lost a son in the Spanish American War - Kennedy a son in World War II. Armagh's daughter was brain damaged in a horse-riding accident - Kennedy's daughter was born mentally handicapped. Both Armagh and Kennedy had sons assassinated while running for president.