Bernie Orenstein, Prolific Sitcom Writer and Producer Behind ‘Sanford and Son,’ ‘That Girl’ and ‘Kate & Allie,’ Dies at 95
Bernie Orenstein, the Canadian-born television writer and producer whose career spanned nearly half a century and included work on some of the most beloved sitcoms in American television history, has died. He was 95. His family announced that he passed away on Sept. 14, though no additional details were immediately provided.
Orenstein was best known for his long and remarkably productive partnership with fellow writer-producer Saul Turteltaub. Together, the two men formed one of the most enduring comedy-writing teams in television, collaborating for more than three decades on shows ranging from That Girl and Sanford and Son to What’s Happening!! and Kate & Allie. Their partnership was unusual in an industry where writing teams often sat side by side, hammering out jokes in the same room. Orenstein and Turteltaub rarely did that. Instead, they divided the work in a way that suited their individual strengths and temperaments.
“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,” Orenstein recalled in a 2016 interview for the TV Academy Foundation website The Interviews. “But we never wrote together, one of us at the typewriter, the other walking behind him pitching lines, like most sitcoms writers do.”
That unusual method apparently worked. Over the years, the pair created, wrote, produced or developed dozens of series, and their names became synonymous with a certain kind of warm, character-driven television comedy that dominated the 1970s and 1980s.
Orenstein’s first major success came in the 1960s, during a three-year stint as a writer on the ABC variety show The Hollywood Palace. That program, which featured a rotating roster of guest hosts and performers, gave him the opportunity to write material for some of the biggest names in entertainment, including Bing Crosby, Judy Garland and Fred Astaire. It was around that time that he first teamed with Turteltaub, and the two quickly discovered a creative chemistry that would sustain them for the rest of their careers.
He often credited Carl Reiner, the legendary comedian and creator of The Dick Van Dyke Show, with teaching him a great deal about comedy. Reiner hired Orenstein and Turteltaub to work on The New Dick Van Dyke Show, a CBS sitcom that ran from 1971 to 1974 and starred Van Dyke as a talk-show host. The experience was formative, and Orenstein never forgot the lessons he learned from Reiner about timing, character and the importance of a well-structured joke.
In 1967, Orenstein and Turteltaub began writing episodes of That Girl, the groundbreaking ABC comedy starring Marlo Thomas as Ann Marie, a young aspiring actress living on her own in New York City. The show was widely considered a milestone in television history, as it was one of the first to center on an independent, unmarried woman who was not defined by a husband or family. Orenstein and Turteltaub joined the series during its first season and later served as writer-producers for its final two years. In retrospect, Orenstein admitted that the pair may have made a misstep by having Ann Marie become engaged to her longtime boyfriend, Donald Hollinger, played by Ted Bessell. The engagement, he said, hurt the show’s ratings by removing some of the tension and freedom that had made the character so appealing.
The duo would make a similar mistake years later when they joined Kate & Allie, the CBS comedy about two divorced women raising their children together. In 1988, after the show had been on the air for several seasons, Orenstein and Turteltaub decided to get Susan Saint James’ character married. The move effectively ended the series. “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-deprecating humor.
One of the most significant chapters of Orenstein’s career began in 1974, when he and Turteltaub came aboard Sanford and Son, the hit NBC sitcom starring Redd Foxx as a cantankerous junk dealer in Los Angeles. The show had been developed by Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear, but by the fourth season, Lear and Yorkin had parted ways, and the producers needed someone who could handle Foxx’s famously difficult temperament. Foxx was in the middle of a contract dispute and had been absent from the show, and the production was in turmoil.
Orenstein and Turteltaub were brought in as producer-writers, and they stayed with the series until it ended in 1977. Despite the behind-the-scenes chaos, Orenstein remembered Foxx fondly. “We got along with him famously,” he said. “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.” Orenstein recalled one incident in which he and Turteltaub got into their cars in the middle of the night to help Foxx search for his dog, which had gotten loose. It was that kind of personal loyalty, Orenstein suggested, that made the working relationship successful.
After their time on Sanford and Son, Orenstein and Turteltaub partnered with Yorkin, who had recently split with Lear, to launch TOY Productions. The new company quickly landed three comedies on ABC. The most successful was What’s Happening!!, a sitcom about a group of Black teenagers growing up in Watts, Los Angeles. The show was based loosely on the film Cooley High and became a beloved staple of 1970s television. Orenstein was responsible for spotting Fred Berry, a former dancer and actor, and hiring him to play the character Rerun. The nickname, Orenstein explained, came from the character having to take classes over and over again.
The other two TOY Productions shows were Carter Country, a comedy about small-town police officers played by Victor French and Kene Holliday, and 13 Queens Boulevard, a short-lived series starring Eileen Brennan. All three shows were canceled on the same day in 1979, which happened to be the day that Columbia Pictures’ Screen Gems bought TOY Productions. It was a bittersweet moment, but Orenstein and Turteltaub continued to work for Columbia on other projects, including One of the Boys, a comedy starring Mickey Rooney alongside two young actors named Dana Carvey and Nathan Lane, and One in a Million, which starred Shirley Hemphill, an actress from What’s Happening!!.
Over the years, Orenstein and Turteltaub wrote and produced for a wide range of series, including Love, American Style and Baby Talk, both for ABC. They also created E/R, a CBS comedy featuring Elliott Gould and a young George Clooney, and wrote for NBC’s You Again?, which starred Jack Klugman and John Stamos. Later in their careers, they served 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 airing after the mega-hit Roseanne. Orenstein was deeply disappointed, especially because the premise was drawn directly 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 to connect 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.”
Born Bernard Orenstein on Feb. 5, 1931, in Toronto, he was the youngest of five boys. He liked to joke 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 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 abilities as a performer. “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.”
Orenstein 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 named Joan Rivers, until Rivers was fired the day after she appeared on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show and became an instant sensation. Orenstein believed that host Allen Funt did not want anyone on the show who might become a bigger star than he was.
Orenstein eventually moved 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, Orenstein convinced producer Nick Vanoff to let him fulfill his contract by writing for The Hollywood Palace. That led to his work with Turteltaub, and the two began selling scripts for sitcoms including Hey, Landlord, Good Morning, World and That Girl. They also wrote and produced The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show, a 1968 NBC variety program, and hired an unknown Lorne Michaels to help them.
In 1971, Orenstein and Turteltaub relocated to Arizona to work on The New Dick Van Dyke Show, then returned to Los Angeles two years later to produce Love, American Style. They later helped future Murphy Brown creator Diane English get her start in television by executive producing her 1985-86 CBS comedy Foley Square.
After his long career in television, Orenstein returned to school to earn his college degree. He also wrote two novels: Fender Mason, published in 2011, about horse racing, and Black Sheep, published in 2013, about comedy and crime. He 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. His family remembered him as someone who “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 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.”
