Linda Rivers (Kate Jackson) is a 26-year-old popular high school teacher in South Carolina whose husband died three years earlier. Rather than renew an active social life, Linda lives with her grandmother (Lillian Gish), and focuses her energies on teaching. Quite by chance, during spring vacation, she happens to spend some time with 18-year-old Paul McCormick (Gerald Prendergast), one of her students. The couple spend a good deal of time together sailing and, almost against their will, they fall in love and enter into involvement.

Aware of the implicit danger in their relationship, Linda and Paul go to great lengths to keep their involvement discreet. But when news of the affair leaks, a community controversy erupts which dramatically alters both their lives and compels the couple to confront the seriousness of their actions.

Thin Ice was filmed on location in and around Charleston, South Carolina. It was directed by Paul Aaron whose credits include the acclaimed production of The Miracle Worker and A Force of One.

This long-forgotten TV-movie is more substantial than it may first appear: Jackson is conflicted and hurt and confused, but also in love, which makes for good drama. The strapping, blonde young man cast as her love-interest is a bit too dim, and perhaps too muscular and callow, when sized up against Kate Jackson, and that throws the film's love story off-balance (he doesn't seem like someone she'd have more than a passing interest in). There's one terrific moment wherein Jackson goes to the boy's house to talk to his mother after the scandal has broke, and both actresses excel with the difficult scene. Not a bad telefilm, one that deserves to be reshown.