It was produced by RHI Entertainment, sponsored by Kraft General Foods and broadcast on CBS on April 24, 1994.

It is also a remake of the 1946 theatrical film The Yearling starring Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman.

A young, impoverished 12-year-old boy named Jody Baxter (Wil Horneff), the lone surviving child of four, lives on a farm in 1870s in an area that is now part of the Ocala National Forest, near Silver Glen Springs, shortly after the American Civil War.

Jody develops a lasting bond with an orphaned deer named Flag.

Reviewer Drew Voros of Variety wrote that "the absence of true grit and dirt-under-fingernails feeling weaken the believability of the drama," though "like the novel and the ’46 film version, death is taken very seriously, and life is not taken for granted.