Bernie Orenstein, the Canadian-born comedy writer and producer whose television career stretched across nearly five decades, died on Sept. 14, his family announced. He was 95. Orenstein was best known for his work on beloved sitcoms including That Girl, Sanford and Son, What’s Happening!! and Kate & Allie, and for a creative partnership with Saul Turteltaub that became one of the most durable writing collaborations in television history.
Orenstein first found significant success 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 Turteltaub for the first time. The two would remain partners for more than 30 years, an unusually long and productive alliance in an industry known for short-lived pairings. What made their partnership even more distinctive was that they rarely worked in the same room together. Instead of the traditional sitcom writing model, in which two writers sit side by side, one at the typewriter while the other paces and pitches jokes, Orenstein and Turteltaub divided the work in their own way.
“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 Television Academy Foundation’s The Interviews project. “But we never wrote together, one of us at the typewriter, the other walking behind him pitching lines, like most sitcoms writers do.”
Orenstein often credited Carl Reiner with teaching him a great deal about comedy. Reiner hired Orenstein and Turteltaub to work on The New Dick Van Dyke Show, the CBS sitcom that ran from 1971 to 1974. That experience helped shape their approach to character-driven humor and gave them a foundation for the many shows they would go on to create, write and produce.
In 1967, Orenstein and Turteltaub began writing episodes of That Girl, the groundbreaking ABC comedy starring Marlo Thomas as Ann Marie, an aspiring actress living on her own in New York City. The show was widely seen as a feminist milestone in television, presenting a young single woman who was independent, ambitious and not defined by marriage. Orenstein and Turteltaub eventually became writer-producers on the series for its final two seasons. In hindsight, Orenstein believed they made a significant 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 tension and freedom that had made the character so appealing.
Years later, they made a similar choice 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 with characteristic self-deprecation.
The duo also became closely associated with Sanford and Son, the Redd Foxx-starring sitcom developed by Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear. Orenstein and Turteltaub joined the show as producer-writers in 1974, beginning with its fourth season, and remained through the series’ end in 1977. Their work on Sanford and Son came at a turbulent time. Foxx was in the middle of a contract dispute and was sitting out the show, and Lear needed producers who could handle the temperamental star. Orenstein and Turteltaub, by their own account, 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,” Orenstein said. He recalled one incident in which he and Turteltaub got into their cars in the middle of the night to help search for Foxx’s dog, who had gotten loose. They also bought a couple of episodes written by a young Garry Shandling, helping to support his early career.
After their time on Sanford and Son, Orenstein and Turteltaub partnered with Bud Yorkin, who had recently split from Norman Lear, 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 police officers starring Victor French and Kene Holliday; 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 that came from the character having to take classes over and over again.
The team’s résumé extended far beyond those shows. They wrote and produced for Love, American Style and Baby Talk, the latter starring Scott Baio, both for ABC. They created the CBS comedy E/R, which featured Elliott Gould and a young George Clooney. They wrote for NBC’s One of the Boys, starring Mickey Rooney alongside early-career Dana Carvey and Nathan Lane. They also wrote for NBC’s You Again?, with Jack Klugman and John Stamos, and for CBS’ 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, even though it had the mega-hit Roseanne as its lead-in. Orenstein believed the premise was perfect because it mirrored 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 is a tall, Irish redhead,” Orenstein explained. “I said, ‘It’s perfect, I know everything we can do!’”
But the show failed to convince audiences that Redgrave’s character would be interested in Mason’s character as he was written. “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,” he said.
Bernard Orenstein was born in Toronto on Feb. 5, 1931. He was 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 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 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, 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 said 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. When that late-night talk show was canceled, a casualty of Carson’s dominance, Orenstein persuaded producer Nick Vanoff to let him fulfill his contract on The Hollywood Palace. There, he wrote material for some of the biggest entertainers in the world, 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 stayed with The Hollywood Palace and also wrote for NBC’s The Monkees. In the evenings, the two got together to write for sitcoms. The first scripts they 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, and in doing so hired an unknown Lorne Michaels to lend a hand.
In 1971, Orenstein and Turteltaub relocated to Arizona to work on The New Dick Van Dyke Show, on which Van Dyke played a talk-show host similar to Carson. They returned to Los Angeles two years later to produce Love, American Style. When Foxx left Sanford and Son for a lucrative deal at ABC, Orenstein and Turteltaub worked on the spinoffs Grady and Sanford Arms. After Columbia Pictures’ Screen Gems bought TOY Productions, a sale that went through in 1979 on the very day that What’s Happening!!, Carter Country and 13 Queens Boulevard were all canceled, they continued working for Columbia on One of the Boys and One in a Million, the latter starring Shirley Hemphill from What’s Happening!!.
The pair also helped future Murphy Brown creator Diane English get a foothold in television by executive producing her 1985-86 CBS comedy Foley Square. After spending two years as story consultants on Cosby, Orenstein decided to return to school and finally earn his college degree. He also wrote two novels: Fender Mason in 2011, about horse racing, and Black Sheep in 2013, about comedy and crime. He taught television history at Long Island University in Brooklyn and bred thoroughbreds.
Orenstein is survived by his second wife, actress Barbara Rhoades, whom he married in February 1979; 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 said.
In his Television Academy Foundation interview, Orenstein was candid about the realities of a career in television. 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.”
