Karen (Tyne Daly) is a San Francisco real estate broker and best friend of psychiatrist Alexandra Benedict (Bonnie Franklin) whose boyfriend leaves her. Karen's husband Phillip (Peter Bonerz) plays rugby with gardener Nick Richmond (Robert Klein) who Karen thinks is the perfect match for Alexandra, but circumstances stop Alexandra from meeting Nick until the last minutes of the narrative.
Daly wears her brown hair with blonde bangs, and is dressed in a series of 1970's-ish loud outfits, but she is more charismatic than Franklin. Although Franklin has some comic skill in handling her series of disastrous dates, Daly uses her smile and pushiness for laughs. We see her on an exercise bike in one domestic scene, and later she is forced to eat two lunches to be able to talk with Nick, which pre-empts Daly's later weight problem.
The teleplay by Terry Louise Fisher and Steve Brown tries to balance homophobia with an awareness of racism - Klein's closed-eye expression has him mistaken for being Chinese, and Chinese workers at the restaurant can't tell that Karen and Phillip are eating twice because `they all look the same'. A patient of Alexandra calculates the mathematical probability of meeting elligible men without factoring the percentage that are gay in San Francisco (!), Alexandra is rejected by a man at a bar because he is more interested in the man he is waiting for, and the men at her woodwork class have that clone look. Despite cliches like `Leading your life like a dress rehearsal', there is a funny line in `It's a zoo and I do not wanna go back on exhibition'.
Director Robert Day handles the near miss meetings of Alexandra and Nick amusingly, though perhaps Franklin might be more successful if not challenged by Daly.
