Synopsis:

Milan, December 2004. Sacked on the spot from an important national television news programme due to a false interview-scoop with a Middle Eastern Rais, Erminio Spampagnati (Ezio Greggio) is once again back in his home town Perozzo, a small made-up Lombard town, where his two ex-wives live (Cecilia Dazzi, alias Mariella and Marina Thovez, alias Carlotta), his antagonists in his private life and in cahoots together, who have given him four children who practically he only remembers the name of.
As much as the family is a notorious stranger and total disaster for Erminio, by contrast television is his whole life and, irrespective of the results, the only thing he knows how to do. Erminio, in fact, is what the Americans call “workaholic”, someone who throw himself entirely into his work.
Willing in each new enterprise to risk his money (not very much), his credibility (even less) and his enthusiasm (this, yes, is abundant), Erminio Spampagnati is a typical adventurer of the ether “Its’ do or die” is his story, the life of a home-grown small lie merchant who finds himself with the possibility of running a small local TV station, “TelePerozzo”, owned by his former father-in-law, the Commendator Romanazzi (Maurizio Mattioli) who lives on the proceeds of
telesales. The main fault of Erminio the “journalist” which unfailingly comes out in all the episodes of the series, is that he always wants to be the absolute protagonist of the events, at the expense of also, in his own words, giving a “slight helping hand to the truth” provided that it makes news. His unscrupulous management of “TelePerozzo”, always together with his extremely faithful and awkward collaborator Natalino (Peppino Centola), will lead him to transform himself into an authentic “inventor” of news, a “Charles Tatum of the Lombard province” (the unforgettable character played by Kirk Douglas in Ace in the hole” by Billy Wilder).