Bernie Orenstein, Prolific TV Writer and Producer Behind Classic Sitcoms, Dies at 95
Bernie Orenstein, the Canadian-born writer and producer whose half-century career in television helped shape some of the most beloved sitcoms in American pop culture, including That Girl, Sanford and Son, What’s Happening!! and Kate & Allie, has died. He was 95. His family announced that he died on Sept. 14, though no further details were provided.
Orenstein’s first major success came in the 1960s during a three-year run as a writer on the ABC variety series The Hollywood Palace. Shortly after that, he teamed with fellow writer Saul Turteltaub for the first time. The two would go on to form one of the most enduring comedy-writing partnerships in television history, lasting more than three decades. What made their collaboration unusual was that they rarely worked in the same room together. In a 2016 interview for the TV Academy Foundation website The Interviews, Orenstein explained their unique method: “I would write one act, [Turteltaub] would write the other act, and we’d put it together and make sure they fit. Often he would write a whole script and I would write a whole script. But we never wrote together, one of us at the typewriter, the other walking behind him pitching lines, like most sitcoms writers do.”
Orenstein credited comedy legend Carl Reiner with teaching him a great deal about the craft. Reiner hired Orenstein and Turteltaub to work on The New Dick Van Dyke Show, the 1971-74 CBS sitcom in which Van Dyke played a talk-show host. That experience proved invaluable for the young writers, who were just beginning to make their mark in the industry.
In 1967, Orenstein and Turteltaub began writing episodes of That Girl, the groundbreaking ABC feminist comedy starring Marlo Thomas as aspiring actress Ann Marie. The show was a landmark for its portrayal of an independent single woman living alone in New York City. Orenstein and Turteltaub eventually became writer-producers on the series for its final two seasons. Looking back, Orenstein admitted that they may have hurt the show’s ratings by having Ann Marie become engaged to her longtime boyfriend Donald Hollinger, played by Ted Bessell. The decision to marry off the central character, he suggested, undercut the premise that had made the show so appealing to audiences.
Years later, they made a similar mistake on Kate & Allie, the CBS comedy starring Susan Saint James and Jane Curtin as two divorced women sharing a home and raising their children together. When Orenstein and Turteltaub joined the show in 1988, they decided to get Saint James’ character married. “We made sure it was the final season by getting her married, a lesson we should have learned on That Girl,” Orenstein said with characteristic self-deprecation.
The duo’s most famous work may have been on Sanford and Son, the Redd Foxx-starring sitcom developed by Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear. Orenstein and Turteltaub came aboard as producer-writers in 1974 for the show’s fourth season and remained until the series ended in 1977. At the time, Yorkin had recently split from Lear, and Orenstein and Turteltaub partnered with him to launch TOY Productions. The new company quickly landed three comedies on ABC: What’s Happening!!, a show about Black teenagers growing up in Watts; Carter Country, a comedy about small-town cops played by Victor French and Kene Holliday; and 13 Queens Boulevard, starring Eileen Brennan.
Orenstein and Turteltaub’s credits extended far beyond those shows. They wrote and produced for Love, American Style and Baby Talk, both for ABC. They created CBS’s E/R, a medical comedy featuring Elliott Gould and a young George Clooney. They wrote for NBC’s One of the Boys, which starred Mickey Rooney alongside up-and-coming performers Dana Carvey and Nathan Lane. They also worked on NBC’s You Again?, starring Jack Klugman and John Stamos, and on CBS’s Cosby, the later vehicle for Bill Cosby.
One of their most personal projects was Chicken Soup, a 1989 ABC comedy starring Jackie Mason and Lynn Redgrave. The show was canceled after only seven episodes, much to Orenstein’s disappointment, despite airing after the mega-hit Roseanne. Orenstein later explained that the show was inspired by his own life. Mason’s character was dating a tall, Irish redhead, played by Redgrave. “He was a short, Jewish guy. I’m a short, Jewish guy. My wife [actress Barbara Rhoades, Orenstein’s wife] is a tall, Irish redhead,” he said. “I said, ‘It’s perfect, I know everything we can do!’” But the premise did not resonate with audiences. “No one could believe that she would be the least bit interested in somebody like Jackie Mason the way he acted on the show. That was its downfall. That was my fault. I was positive that my life would be accepted by America. Apparently, it wasn’t.”
Orenstein was born Bernard Orenstein on Feb. 5, 1931, in Toronto, the youngest of five boys. He had no middle name, he joked, because “we were too poor for that.” His father sold women’s clothing and struggled with a gambling problem, while his mother was a homemaker. As a child, Orenstein acted on CBC radio programs, and after dropping out of the University of Toronto, he appeared on the network’s television variety shows. He was honest about his early performing abilities: “I was awful, to tell you the truth. Nevertheless, it was easy in those days. Nobody knew anything about television. They paid very little, and anybody who had any nerve to get up in front of a camera was accepted. I had nerve as opposed to talent.”
Orenstein acted and wrote for the CBC variety program The Barris Beat, produced by Norman Jewison, the future Oscar-nominated filmmaker. In 1965, he moved to New York and landed a job on the CBS prank show Candid Camera. He carpooled with another young writer, Joan Rivers, until she was fired the day after she appeared on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show and became an instant hit. Orenstein recalled that host Allen Funt “didn’t want anyone who was a bigger star, possibly, than he was.”
Orenstein eventually came to Los Angeles to write for ABC’s The Les Crane Show, a late-night talk show that struggled against Carson. When that program was canceled, he persuaded producer Nick Vanoff to let him fulfill his contract on The Hollywood Palace. There, he wrote material for legendary entertainers including Bing Crosby, Judy Garland and Fred Astaire.
In 1967, Orenstein was offered the chance to write the pilot for a Pat Boone afternoon talk show. He enlisted Turteltaub, whom he had met in New York, to help. While Turteltaub worked on the Boone program, Orenstein stayed with The Hollywood Palace and also wrote for NBC’s The Monkees. The pair would get together in the evenings to write for sitcoms. Their first scripts sold were for the comedies Hey, Landlord at NBC, Good Morning, World at CBS and That Girl. They also wrote and produced the 1968 NBC variety program The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show, hiring an unknown Lorne Michaels to assist them.
In 1971, Orenstein and Turteltaub relocated to Arizona to work on The New Dick Van Dyke Show, before returning to Los Angeles two years later to produce Love, American Style. They then jumped to Sanford and Son at the request of Norman Lear, who needed producers who could handle the temperamental Redd Foxx. At the time, Foxx was sitting out the show in a contract dispute. Orenstein said they got along with Foxx famously. “He was very protective of us, the two white Jewish guys writing a Black show and coming under criticism from the Beverly Hills [chapter of the] NAACP.” Once, Orenstein recalled, he and Turteltaub got in their cars in the middle of the night to help find Foxx’s dog, who had gotten loose. They also bought a couple of episodes written by Garry Shandling.
When Foxx left for a lucrative ABC deal, Orenstein and Turteltaub worked on the spinoffs Grady and Sanford Arms. For What’s Happening!!, Orenstein spotted Fred Berry and hired him to play the character Rerun, a nickname earned from having to take classes over and over. After Columbia Pictures’ Screen Gems bought TOY Productions—the sale went through in 1979 on the very day that What’s Happening!!, Carter Country and 13 Queens Boulevard were canceled—they worked for Columbia on One of the Boys and One in a Million, starring Shirley Hemphill from What’s Happening!!. They also helped future Murphy Brown creator Diane English gain a foothold in television by executive producing her 1985-86 CBS comedy, Foley Square.
After spending two years as story consultants on Cosby, Orenstein returned to school to earn his college degree. He wrote two novels: Fender Mason in 2011, about horse racing, and Black Sheep in 2013, about comedy and crime. He taught TV history at Long Island University in Brooklyn and bred thoroughbreds.
In addition to his second wife, Barbara Rhoades, whom he married in February 1979, Orenstein is survived by his children, Lisa, Barbara, Jenny and Alec; eight grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. His family noted, “He lived with boundless creativity, humor and love, always keeping family close and finding joy in every moment.”
In his TV Academy Foundation interview, Orenstein reflected on the realities of a career in television, acknowledging that he had many more misses than hits. “If you look at my résumé, it’s really depressing if you ever wanted to be in the business,” he said. “Although I wrote hundreds of scripts and produced, I don’t know, 40 shows, I’d say only four or five of them were really successful. It’s not an easy business. But as a writer, you’re never out of work. You can always sit down in front of a typewriter.”
