"Lewis Vendredi made a deal with the devil to sell cursed antiques. But he broke the pact, and it cost him his soul. Now, his niece Micki, and her cousin Ryan have inherited the store... and with it, the curse. Now they must get everything back and the real terror begins." -- prologue that opened each episode

An antiques dealer named Lewis Vendredi (played by R.G. Armstrong) made a deal with the Devil to sell cursed antiques out of his shop, "Vendredi's Antiques", in exchange for wealth and immortality. He eventually grew tired of being the Devil's puppet and broke the deal. The Devil came and claimed the soul of Vendredi ("Friday" in French) for breaking the deal.

After Lewis' death, his shop was inherited by his niece, Micki Foster (played by Louise Robey) and her cousin Ryan Dallion (played by John D. LeMay). They sold off many of the cursed antiques before being stopped by Jack Marshak (played by Chris Wiggins). Jack was Lewis' friend, a retired world-traveller and mystic who originally collected many of the antiques for Vendredi before they became cursed.

The series follows the protagonists as they hunt down the cursed antiques, which are usually in the possession of people who have discovered their evil powers and are reluctant to give them up. Since the cursed antiques are completely indestructible, the ones that the group acquires are locked away in a vault beneath "Curious Goods", the rechristened antique store.

Most of the stories in the series deal with people using the cursed objects for their own personal gain. All of the cursed objects grant either the user's deepest desire or some extraordinary power. However, the curse always requires that the cursed object be used to kill someone in order to activate it. For example, there is a cursed scalpel that gives a surgeon the ability to cure anyone, but in order for the scalpel to work, the surgeon will need to kill someone else with it beforehand. In most instances, the person using the cursed object ends up becoming a victim of the object's curse.

Occasionally, there would be an episode in which the trio would have to confront their uncle's spirit or would fail to obtain a cursed object, and the search would be continued in another episode.

Like other sci-fi/horror shows in syndication in the late 1980s (such as War of the Worlds and Freddy's Nightmares), Friday the 13th: The Series constantly pushed the "acceptable content" envelope, regularly featuring violence on par with that of the R-rated horror movies of the time.

The second season saw the introduction of Johnny Ventura (played by Steve Monarque). He greatly helps recover the relics and eventually replaces Ryan permanently in the third season. A romantic interest between Johnny and Micki is explored, but eventually dropped.

There is a popular rumor that the last episode was to unite the movie and television franchises by having the final item recovered (see "Premise" above) be the hockey mask belonging to Jason Voorhees. This remains unfounded and while there was talk about having a hockey mask on one of the sets as an in-joke, there was never any serious intention to mix the film series into the television series .

However, Eric Morse wrote the webnovel The Mask of Jason Voorhees, the fifth and last book in his "Camp Crystal Lake" series of novels which united the novels, the first nine movies, and the television series into one continuity. The concepts in the book were created by Eric Morse and are not the original intent of the show's creators and thus, should not be treated as official canon.