Beyond the issues of why they're doing it, the seemingly most difficult thing for Los Angeles realtor Frank Benson and his wife Elaine Benson about their imminent divorce after nineteen years of marriage is how to tell their college student daughter, Nancy Benson, as she has always viewed them as the perfect couple. It becomes even more difficult when Nancy brings home her latest boyfriend, fellow student David Poe, a contemporary musician, as they announce their engagement, Frank and Elaine not wanting to rain on her parade or dissuade her on the institution of marriage in which they still believe. Nancy and David need a good role model in David being the product of a broken home, his brash father, rock music promoter Oliver Poe, who has had one girlfriend after another, the latest being model Laverne Baker. While Frank doesn't remember the encounter, Oliver has had a long standing feud with Frank over a former real estate transaction. Much to Frank and Elaine's dismay, Nancy, upon learning of the divorce, and David decide not to get married but instead live together, drop out of college, and join Oliver's latest find in a band, The Comfortable Chair. While Frank and Elaine want to move on with their personal lives - Frank with divorced client Lois Gray and Elaine with competing realtor Phil Fletcher who she hired to sell their house - they find something else of a greater priority when they learn that pregnant Nancy and David have been persuaded by a spiritual guru named The Baba Ziba to give their baby up for adoption, he Oliver's lackey with Oliver's ulterior motive being as Nancy and David would quit the band if they keep the baby. As such, Frank and Elaine, using assumed names, pretending to still be married living "part-time" in a house they share together, and not telling anyone of what they are doing, decide to adopt the baby themselves and keep him until Nancy and David, in Frank and Nancy's words, "come to their senses". The question then becomes what the consequences of their decision to adopt the baby will be.
—Huggo