a group of americans in northern california in 1984 are struggling with the consequences of their lives in the sixties still run by the passions of those times sexual and political which have refused to die among them is zoyd wheeler who is preparing for his annual act of televised insanity for which he receives a government stipend when an unwelcome face appears from out of his pastan old nemesis federal prosecutor brock vond storms into vineland at the head of a heavily armed strike force soon zoyd and his daughter prairie go into hiding while vond begins a relationship with zoyds exwife and uses prairie as a pawn against the mother she never knew she hadpart daytime drama part political thriller vineland is a strange evocation of a twentiethcentury america headed for a less than harmonic future