The Estabrook family, a quirky and eccentric group of individuals, live in New York City in 1961, right after John F. Kennedy's election and during the Cold War years in the U.S. Due to widespread pervasive Soviet paranoia at the time, and the family's idiosyncratic nature, some neighbors in the apartment building began to suspect that, not only was the family odd but that they were also Soviet spies. When the mother of the family decides to hold a dinner with the neighbors in order to quell the rumors, the daughters, being irrepressible pranksters, decide to play a prank on the visitors. So, the quiet and calm evening designed to give the family a "typical" American family image and settle the spiraling rumors wasn't so quiet and calm after all.