Plot
Architect Peter Mitchell (Tom Selleck), cartoonist Michael Kellam (Steve Guttenberg) and actor Jack Holden (Ted Danson) are happy living their lives as bachelors in their lofty New York City apartment. Their lives are disrupted when a baby arrives on their doorstep one day. A note with the child, Mary, indicates that it is Jack's, the result of an affair with a recent co-star. The baby arrives in Jack's absence – he is in Turkey shooting a B movie, leaving Peter and Michael to fend for themselves in taking care of the child, something in which their lack of experience befuddles them.
At one point, Peter and Michael are mistakenly led to believe that they are to deliver Mary to two men who arrive at their door asking for "the package". They discover moments before their departure that the men are drug dealers who were actually seeking a package of heroin. They retrieve the infant, leaving the men with a can of powdered milk.
What results is a major change to the men's lives as they try to adjust to surrogate fatherhood—balancing the demands of work and the rearing of a child. Soon their paternal instincts take hold, and they grow attached to the child. Eventually, when Jack returns, Peter and Michael do not hesitate in taking their revenge and passing all responsibility of looking after Mary to Jack, but Jack quickly grows to love his daughter.
The drug dealers, demanding payment, eventually ransack the men's apartment looking for their drugs. The men formulate a plan to trap the dealers when they negotiate a deal to deliver the illicit goods. With a recording of the conversation, the men prove their innocence to the police and the dealers are arrested.
The three men then fully embrace their new role as Mary's guardians, however one day the baby's mother, an English woman named Sylvia (Nancy Travis), arrives, asking for Mary back intending to take her to England to live with her family. Handing her over, the three quickly find themselves miserable and desperately missing Mary. Deciding to stop Sylvia and Mary from leaving, they rush to the airport to try and persuade Sylvia to stay however they arrive just as her plane leaves. Defeated, the men return to their apartment, where they find both Sylvia and Mary. Sylvia explains she doesn't want to give up her career but can't do this if she has to raise Mary alone, so Peter quickly invites her and Mary to move into their apartment with them with Jack and Michael's agreement, and she agrees.
Read more about this topic: Three Men And A Baby
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)