A landmark 1970s family saga with real sweep, strong performances, and the kind of melodramatic momentum that helped define the era’s prestige miniseries boom. It’s uneven by modern standards, but the emotional stakes, class divide, and generational drama still land.
49% ★★☆☆☆ (3,860)
Rich Man, Poor Man
Where to watch: Buy
TV Show · Drama · Soap
1976 · ★ 49% (3.9K)
The story of the Jordache brothers, whose lives follow very different paths.
Starring: Peter Strauss, Nick Nolte, Susan Blakely
Overview
Based on the best-selling 1969 novel by Irwin Shaw, the series follows the divergent career courses of the impoverished German American Jordache brothers.
Production
Universal Television, Harve Bennett Productions
Cast
Peter Strauss, Nick Nolte, Susan Blakely, Ed Asner, Dorothy McGuire, Bill Bixby, Ray Milland, Robert Reed, Murray Hamilton, Dorothy Malone, Gloria Grahame, Lynda Day George, George Maharis, Andrew Duggan, Tim McIntire, William Smith, Norman Fell, Lawrence Pressman, Van Johnson, Craig Stevens
Curator Review
Verdict
A landmark 1970s family saga with real sweep, strong performances, and the kind of melodramatic momentum that helped define the era’s prestige miniseries boom. It’s uneven by modern standards, but the emotional stakes, class divide, and generational drama still land.
Best for
Viewers who like big, serialized family dramas
Fans of 1970s TV with a prestige-soap feel
People interested in classic miniseries and TV event storytelling
Anyone drawn to class conflict, ambition, and sibling rivalry
Skip if
You want a fast, modern pace
You dislike melodrama or heightened soap elements
You prefer tightly plotted limited series with no digressions
You need contemporary production values
Overview
Rich Man, Poor Man is one of the defining American TV sagas of the 1970s: sprawling, emotional, and built around the divergent lives of two brothers shaped by class, luck, and temperament. It has the kind of earnest, novelistic ambition that television rarely attempted at the time, and the cast gives it weight beyond its occasional soapiness.
Worth noting
What still works best is the sense of scale. The series moves from intimate family conflict to broader social ambition, and it understands how success and failure can feel like inherited conditions. Peter Strauss and Nick Nolte anchor the story well, and the show’s cultural importance is easy to understand once it gets going.
Bottom line
It is also very much a product of its era. The pacing can be leisurely, the dialogue broad, and some turns feel melodramatic in a way modern viewers may find old-fashioned. But for viewers open to classic TV storytelling, it remains an absorbing, influential watch rather than a mere relic.