Basically, it’s boy meets cute girl, girl hates boy and vice versa, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl will live happily, at least as long as it lasts.
The characters are updated and slightly older, Neil Simon said, but otherwise, a new TV version of his "The Goodbye Girl" retains the easy charm and predictable plot of the 1977 hit film and later Broadway play.
"The Goodbye Girl," TV style, will premiere Jan. 16 on Turner Network Television (TNT) at 8 p.m. and encore at the same time on Jan. 17 and 18.
Simon originally wrote "The Goodbye Girl" as a film, starring Richard Dreyfuss, who won an Oscar, and Marsha Mason, then Simon’s wife, who received an Oscar nomination.
The principals then and now are Paula McFadden (Patricia Heaton), a 30-something New York dancer and divorcée, whose actor boyfriend has just dumped her and left town. Not enough, he surreptitiously subleased the apartment to an actor friend, Elliot Garfield (Jeff Daniels), who arrives one dark and stormy night to the horror of Paula and her precocious daughter, Lucy Hallie Kate Eisenberg).
With living space hard to come by in the Big Apple, Paula and Elliot reach a reluctant and hostile modus vivendi by sharing the apartment. When both suffer professional rejections, they console each other with sympathy evolving into friendship and love.
Aside from introducing a few contemporary gadgets, such as cell phones, the script is pretty much the same as the original.
"Our characters are a bit older, they talk faster and the romance is more adult," director Richard Benjamin noted.
But is the Elliot Garfield character Jewish? Simon was noncommittal, but Benjamin guessed that "he seems to have a Jewish gene somewhere."
For comparison, the original "Goodbye Girl" with Dreyfuss airs Jan. 15 at 10 p.m. on TCM (Turner Classic Movies).
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.