A fatal car crash sends socialites George and Marion Kerby (Kate Jackson and Andrew Stevens) from this world into the next - without however passing into heaven. First, they must perform one good deed. The Kerby's spirits target Cosmo Topper (Jack Warden), Their lawyer who had always envied their carefree existence. They decide to brighten up his life, whether he likes it or not.

“Topper,” a modern retelling of the classic 1937 movie about two brand new angels who have a devil of a time getting into heaven. The original film stared Cary Grant, Constance Bennett and Billie Burke with Roland Young in the title role. Two sequels were subsequently made with different casts, "Topper Takes a Trip' and "Topper Returns". Anne Jeffries, Robert Sterling and Leo G. Carroll starred for three years in a 1950s television series based on the Thorne Smith comedy novel, making it a well-worn and familiar property to several generations.

Kate Jackson was negotiating for rights to "Topper" when she met and married Andrew Stevens. "I always thought it would be fun to revive "Topper" and when I married Andrew he speeded up the process of negotiating  with the Thorne Smith estate" Kate said. "We are staying pretty close to the original movie but we've added some characters and plot twists to meet the demands of the two-hour format which is considerably longer than the original picture." The couple spent most of the first year of their marriage putting the package together for their Cosmo Productions.   "Topper" was the first feature from Cosmo Productions which Kate Jackson and Andrew Stevens activated soon after she left Charlie’s Angels.  “One of our big hopes,” said Andrew Stevens, “the thing we talked about trying to do after we were married was to control our own work and we knew we had to produce in order to do that.” As a result, Kate and Andrew served as executive producers of “Topper” with Robert A. Papazian as producer. Charles S. Dubin directed the teleplay which was written by George Kirgo, Maryanne Kasica and Michael Scheff. They worked on the script, did the casting, selected location sites, chose the musical scoring, helped with the editing and controlled the final cut. "Once we bought the property we were confronted with the decision of making it a feature film or a TV movie and we decided on the TV format so we could assume 100 percent financial responsibility and ownership" said Andrew Stevens. "We called the shots on this one in all the creative departments" Kate added.

The easiest part was acting together. Its my first TV appearance since I left Charlie's Angels more than a year ago. We brought a lot of the problems home from the set and hashed them over during dinner every night. We've really devoted a year of our life to getting the movie done the way we want it. After the first showing on ABC we own the property outright" said Kate Jackson. "We put our salaries up against the picture's budget, meaning if we ran over budget the difference would come out of our pay. We didn't run over by much and the profits bought us our new house. If it gets high numbers in the Nielsen Ratings, we may just go into production with "Topper": as a weekly series. Besides  being an exciting creative venture, "Topper" has been a fascinating business venture. We learned a lot about production for future projects we hope to make" said Kate Jackson.

In their new version of "Topper" , Kate stars as Marion Kerby and Andrew stars as George Kerby, a carefree and rich young couple whose dedication to the good life is cut short when they crash their car on their way home from a night of parting. To their great surprise, the Kerbys discover they never got around to doing enough good deeds to qualify them for heaven. And, if they don’t do one real quick, they will simply fade away! Rue McClanahan stars as Carla, Topper’s stuffy wife who is mystified by the changes suddenly taking place in her husband. Carla doesn’t know Topper is trying to cope with two beings who are only visible to him and who are determined to do him a good deed and become full-fledged angels. For Kate, the role was a delight after eight years in series television.

"Topper" is available only on VHS. It hasn't been yet released on DVD. It is considered one of the hard-to-find videos today.