Scriptwriters Lipman and Cowen consciously framed the narrative about AIDS in the generic conventions of the family melodrama. Strategically, this approach provided a familiar, less threatening environment in which to present information and issues surrounding gay men and the disease. At one level, the narrative of An Early Frost exposes the tenuous links that hold the middle-class Pierson family together. On the surface, life appears to be idyllic. Nick Pierson is the successful owner of a lumberyard. He and his wife Kate have reared to seemingly well-adjusted children in a Suburban neighborhood. Son Michael is a rising young lawyer in Chicago. Daughter Susan has replicated her parents’ lifestyle, married with one child and expecting a second.

Under the surface, however, several familial fissures exist. Nick’s upwardly mobile class aspirations are stalled. Kate’s creative Talent as a concert pianist has been sublimated into the demands of being a wife and mother. Susan acquiesces to her own husband's demands rather than follow her own desires. Unknown to the family, Michael, a closeted gay man, lives with his lover Peter. The fragile veneer of familial stability bursts apart when Michael learns he has AIDS, exposing all the resentments that various family members have repressed.

The script also includes a parallel narrative thread exploring the conflicts in the gay relationship between Michael and Peter. Their relationship suffers from Michael's workaholic attitude towards his job. Conflict also grows out of Peter's openness about his homosexuality and Michael's inability to be open about his sexuality. The tension between the two is further exacerbated when Michael discovers that Peter has been unfaithful because of these conflicts.

When broadcast, An Early Frost drew a 33 share of the viewing audience, winning it's time slot for the evening’s ratings and thus suggesting that the American public was ready to engage in a cultural discussion of the disease. Even so, the ratings success did not translate into economic profits for NBC. According to Perry Lafferty, the NBC vice president who commissioned the project, the network lost $500,000 in advertising revenues because clients were afraid to have their commercials shown during the broadcast. Apparently, advertisers believed that the subject matter was too controversial because of its homosexual theme and too depressing because of the terminal nature of AIDS as a disease.

These concerns inhibited further production of other made-for-television scripts about AIDS until 1988. Ironically, the production quality of An Early Frost became a hallmark by which members of the broadcasting industry measured any subsequent development  of movie scripts about AIDS. Arthur Allan Seidelman, director of an NBC afternoon school-break special about AIDS titled An Enemy among Us, has stated, “There was some concern after An Early Frost was done that ‘How many more things can you do about AIDS?” Any new scripts had to live up to and move beyond the standard set by Cowen and Lipman’s original made-for-television movie. Although providing the initial mainstream cultural space to examine AIDS, An Early Frost also hindered, in some ways, increased discussion of the disease in prime-time American broadcast programming precisely because it achieved its narrative and informational goals so well.