Bernie Orenstein, the Canadian-born comedy writer and producer whose career spanned nearly five decades and included work on some of television’s most beloved sitcoms, died on Sept. 14. He was 95. His family announced his death, remembering him as a man who “lived with boundless creativity, humor and love, always keeping family close and finding joy in every moment.”
Orenstein was best known for his long and remarkably productive partnership with Saul Turteltaub, a collaboration that lasted more than 30 years and produced an extraordinary string of television comedies. Together, they wrote for and produced shows such as That Girl, Sanford and Son, What’s Happening!!, Kate & Allie, Love, American Style, Baby Talk, E/R, One of the Boys, You Again? and Cosby. They also created the short-lived but memorable ABC comedy Chicken Soup, starring Jackie Mason and Lynn Redgrave.
What made their partnership unusual, Orenstein once explained, was that they rarely worked in the same room. In a 2016 interview for the TV Academy Foundation website The Interviews, he described their method: “I would write one act, he 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.” He noted that they never sat together at a typewriter with one pitching lines while the other typed, the way most sitcom writing teams did. “But we never wrote together,” he said. “One of us at the typewriter, the other walking behind him pitching lines, like most sitcoms writers do.”
Orenstein’s first major success came in the 1960s, during a three-year stint as a writer on ABC’s variety show The Hollywood Palace. It was there that he wrote material for some of the biggest stars of the era, including Bing Crosby, Judy Garland and Fred Astaire. Shortly after that, he teamed up with Turteltaub, and the two began a partnership that would define the rest of his career.
Born Bernard Orenstein on Feb. 5, 1931, in Toronto, he was the youngest of five boys. He often joked that he had no middle name 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 young man, Orenstein acted on CBC radio programs and later appeared on the network’s television variety shows after dropping out of the University of Toronto. He was candid about his early performing abilities. “I was awful, to tell you the truth,” he said. “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.”
He acted and wrote for the CBC variety program The Barris Beat, which was produced by Norman Jewison, the future film director of Moonstruck and In the Heat of the Night. In 1965, Orenstein 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 finish out his contract on The Hollywood Palace. That led to his first major career breakthrough.
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. In the evenings, the two got together to write sitcom scripts. Their first sales were to the comedies Hey, Landlord at NBC, Good Morning, World at CBS and That Girl at ABC.
They began writing episodes of That Girl in 1967 during its first season and eventually became writer-producers on the groundbreaking feminist comedy for its final two years. The show, starring Marlo Thomas as aspiring actress Ann Marie, was a landmark for its portrayal of an independent single woman. But Orenstein and Turteltaub made a decision that they later acknowledged hurt the show’s ratings: they had Ann Marie become engaged to her longtime boyfriend, Donald Hollinger, played by Ted Bessell. Orenstein admitted that the engagement undercut the show’s premise and its appeal.
They made a similar mistake years later when they joined CBS’s Kate & Allie in 1988. The show, starring Susan Saint James and Jane Curtin, followed two divorced women who lived together with their children. Orenstein and Turteltaub 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.
Before that, the duo had become deeply involved in one of the most iconic sitcoms of the 1970s: Sanford and Son. The show, starring Redd Foxx as junk dealer Fred Sanford, had been developed by Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear. Orenstein and Turteltaub came aboard as producer-writers in 1974 for the fourth season and stayed until the show ended in 1977. They were brought in at the request of Lear, who needed producers who could handle the temperamental Foxx, who was then in the middle of a contract dispute and sitting out the show.
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,” he recalled. Once, in the middle of the night, Orenstein and Turteltaub got into their cars to help Foxx find his dog, which had gotten loose. They also bought a couple of episodes written by a young Garry Shandling.
After Foxx left the show for a lucrative ABC deal, Orenstein and Turteltaub worked on the spinoffs Grady and Sanford Arms. They also partnered with Yorkin, who had recently split with Lear, to launch TOY Productions. The new company landed three comedies on ABC: What’s Happening!!, about Black teenagers growing up in Watts; Carter Country, with Victor French and Kene Holliday as small-town cops; and 13 Queens Boulevard, starring Eileen Brennan. For What’s Happening!!, Orenstein spotted Fred Berry and hired him to play the character Rerun, a nickname earned because the character had to take classes over and over.
In 1979, Columbia Pictures’ Screen Gems bought TOY Productions. The sale went through on the same day that all three of the company’s ABC shows were canceled. Orenstein and Turteltaub then worked for Columbia on One of the Boys, which starred Mickey Rooney alongside young Dana Carvey and Nathan Lane, and One in a Million, starring Shirley Hemphill from What’s Happening!!.
The pair also helped future Murphy Brown creator Diane English get her start in television by executive producing her 1985-86 CBS comedy Foley Square. They later spent two years as story consultants on Cosby, the CBS sitcom starring Bill Cosby.
One of Orenstein’s most personal projects was Chicken Soup, a 1989 ABC comedy starring Jackie Mason and Lynn Redgrave. The show was canceled after only seven episodes, despite having the mega-hit Roseanne as its lead-in. Orenstein was deeply disappointed. He explained that the premise was drawn from his own life: Mason’s character was a short Jewish man dating a tall Irish redhead, played by Redgrave. Orenstein himself was a short Jewish man, and his wife, actress Barbara Rhoades, was a tall Irish redhead. “I said, ‘It’s perfect, I know everything we can do!’” he recalled. But the show failed because audiences could not believe that Redgrave’s character would be interested in Mason’s character as 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 also credited Carl Reiner with teaching him a great deal about comedy. Reiner hired him and Turteltaub to work on The New Dick Van Dyke Show, a 1971-74 CBS sitcom in which Van Dyke played a talk-show host. The writers relocated to Arizona for that show before returning to Los Angeles two years later to produce Love, American Style.
In his later years, Orenstein returned to school to earn his college degree. He wrote two novels: Fender Mason, published in 2011, about horse racing, and Black Sheep, published in 2013, about comedy and crime. He also taught television history at Long Island University in Brooklyn and bred thoroughbred horses.
Orenstein is survived by his second wife, whom he married in February 1979; his children, Lisa, Barbara, Jenny and Alec; eight grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
In his TV Academy Foundation interview, Orenstein reflected honestly on the nature of his career. He acknowledged 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.”
