Bernie Orenstein, Prolific Sitcom Writer and Producer Behind ‘That Girl’ and ‘Sanford and Son,’ Dies at 95

Bernie Orenstein, the Canadian-born comedy writer and producer who spent nearly half a century shaping American television with hits such as That Girl, Sanford and Son, What’s Happening!!, and Kate & Allie, died Sept. 14. He was 95. His family announced the death but did not provide additional details.

Orenstein’s career stretched from the golden age of variety television in the 1960s through the sitcom boom of the 1970s and 1980s and into the 1990s. He was best known for his long creative partnership with Saul Turteltaub, a collaboration that lasted more than three decades and produced some of the most enduring comedy programming of the era. The two men were rarely in the same room while working, yet they became one of the most reliable and respected teams in the business.

“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 served them well. Orenstein said he learned a great deal about comedy from Carl Reiner, who hired him and Turteltaub to work on The New Dick Van Dyke Show, the 1971-74 CBS sitcom starring Van Dyke as a talk-show host. Reiner, a master of television comedy from his years on Your Show of Shows and The Dick Van Dyke Show, helped sharpen the duo’s instincts for character-driven humor.

Orenstein and Turteltaub began writing episodes of That Girl in 1967, during the show’s first season. The ABC series, starring Marlo Thomas as aspiring actress Ann Marie, was groundbreaking for its portrayal of a single young woman living independently in New York City. Orenstein and Turteltaub eventually became writer-producers on the show for its final two seasons. In retrospect, Orenstein believed they made a crucial mistake 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 romantic tension that had fueled the comedy.

They made a similar misstep years later when they joined Kate & Allie in 1988. The CBS sitcom starred Susan Saint James and Jane Curtin as two divorced women who move in 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.

The duo came aboard Sanford and Son in 1974, joining the Redd Foxx-starring sitcom for its fourth season. The show, developed by Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear, was an American adaptation of the British series Steptoe and Son, centered on a cantankerous junk dealer and his long-suffering son. Orenstein and Turteltaub served as producer-writers and stayed with the show until it ended in 1977.

After Lear and Yorkin split, Orenstein and Turteltaub partnered with Yorkin to launch TOY Productions. The new company quickly 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 police officers; and 13 Queens Boulevard, starring Eileen Brennan. The shows reflected the changing landscape of American television in the 1970s, when networks were increasingly willing to feature diverse casts and stories.

Orenstein and Turteltaub also wrote and produced for Love, American Style and Baby Talk, both for ABC. They created E/R, a CBS comedy starring Elliott Gould and a young George Clooney. They wrote for NBC’s One of the Boys, which starred Mickey Rooney alongside newcomers Dana Carvey and Nathan Lane, and for NBC’s You Again?, featuring Jack Klugman and John Stamos. Later, they served as story consultants on Cosby, the CBS sitcom starring 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 had high hopes for the show because its premise mirrored 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 married to actress Barbara Rhoades, a tall, Irish redhead.

“I said, ‘It’s perfect, I know everything we can do!’” Orenstein recalled. “But 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 had no middle name. “We were too poor for that,” he joked. His father sold women’s clothing and struggled with a gambling problem, while his mother was a homemaker. As a youngster, 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 honest 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.”

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 sensation. Host Allen Funt, Orenstein said, “didn’t want anyone who was a bigger star, possibly, than he was.”

Orenstein soon headed to Los Angeles to write for ABC’s The Les Crane Show. When that late-night talk show was canceled, he convinced producer Nick Vanoff to let him fulfill his contract on The Hollywood Palace, the ABC variety series. There he wrote material for some of the biggest entertainers of the era, 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. Turteltaub worked on the Boone program while Orenstein remained 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 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, the writers relocated to Arizona to work on The New Dick Van Dyke Show. Two years later, they returned to Los Angeles to produce Love, American Style. They then moved to Sanford and Son at the request of Norman Lear, who needed producers who could handle the temperamental Redd Foxx. Foxx was then sitting out the show in a contract dispute. Orenstein and Turteltaub, however, got along with him 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,” Orenstein said. Once, he recalled, he and Turteltaub got in their cars in the middle of the night to help find Foxx’s dog, which had gotten loose. They also bought a couple of episodes written by Garry Shandling, then a rising young comedian.

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 role that made Berry a beloved figure to a generation of viewers. The nickname came from the character having to take classes over and over.

In 1979, Columbia Pictures’ Screen Gems bought TOY Productions. The sale went through on the same day that What’s Happening!!, Carter Country, and 13 Queens Boulevard were all canceled. Orenstein and Turteltaub then worked for Columbia on One of the Boys and One in a Million, starring Shirley Hemphill, who had appeared on 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, whom he married in February 1979, Orenstein is survived by his children, Lisa, Barbara, Jenny, and Alec; eight grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. “He lived with boundless creativity, humor and love, always keeping family close and finding joy in every moment,” his family noted.

In his TV Academy Foundation interview, Orenstein acknowledged that he had many more misses than hits over the course of his long career. “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.”