Bernie Orenstein, Prolific Sitcom Writer and Producer Behind ‘Sanford and Son’ and ‘That Girl,’ Dies at 95
Bernie Orenstein, the Canadian-born writer and producer whose decades-long career in television helped shape some of the most beloved sitcoms of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, died on Sept. 14, his family announced. He was 95.
Orenstein worked on a remarkable string of shows over nearly half a century, including That Girl, Sanford and Son, What’s Happening!! and Kate & Allie. But his first major success came in the 1960s, during a three-year stint as a writer on the ABC variety series The Hollywood Palace. Soon after, he teamed with Saul Turteltaub for the first time, beginning a partnership that would last more than 30 years and become one of the most enduring writing and producing collaborations in television comedy.
The two men had an unusual working relationship. They rarely wrote together in the same room, yet they managed to build a seamless creative partnership. Orenstein once explained their method in a 2016 interview for the TV Academy Foundation website The Interviews, speaking with Adrienne Faillace.
“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,” Orenstein said. “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 and starred Van Dyke as a talk-show host.
The duo began writing episodes of That Girl in 1967, during the show’s first season. They later served as writer-producers on the groundbreaking ABC 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 believed he and Turteltaub made a crucial mistake that hurt the show’s ratings: they had Ann Marie become engaged to her longtime boyfriend, Donald Hollinger, played by Ted Bessell.
Years later, they made a similar choice after joining CBS’ Kate & Allie in 1988. The show starred Susan Saint James and Jane Curtin as two divorced women raising their children together. When Orenstein and Turteltaub took over, they decided to get Saint James’ character married. The result, Orenstein admitted, was not what they hoped.
“We made sure it was the final season by getting her married, a lesson we should have learned on That Girl,” he 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 based on the British series Steptoe and Son and followed a cantankerous junk dealer in Los Angeles and his long-suffering son, played by Demond Wilson. Orenstein and Turteltaub stayed with the show until it ended in 1977.
Around that time, they partnered with Yorkin, who had recently split from 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, starring Victor French and Kene Holliday as small-town police officers; and 13 Queens Boulevard, starring Eileen Brennan.
Orenstein and Turteltaub also wrote and produced for Love, American Style and Baby Talk, both for ABC. They created CBS’ 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 newcomers Dana Carvey and Nathan Lane. They also worked on NBC’s You Again?, with Jack Klugman and John Stamos, and 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, despite having the mega-hit Roseanne as its lead-in. Orenstein had high hopes for the show because it was based on 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!’” Orenstein recalled.
But the premise did not convince 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 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. 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,” 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, 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. Host Allen Funt, Orenstein said, “didn’t want anyone who was a bigger star, possibly, than he was.”
Orenstein later came 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. There, he wrote material for legends 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 Hollywood Palace and also wrote for NBC’s The Monkees. In the evenings, the two got together to write for sitcoms.
Their first sold scripts 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. Two years later, they returned to Los Angeles to produce Love, American Style.
They moved 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 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, 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 Rerun, a character whose nickname came from having to take classes over and over.
After Columbia Pictures’ Screen Gems bought TOY Productions, the sale went through in 1979 on the same day that What’s Happening!!, Carter Country and 13 Queens Boulevard were canceled. The pair then worked for Columbia on One of the Boys and One in a Million, starring Shirley Hemphill.
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: 2011’s Fender Mason, about horse racing, and 2013’s Black Sheep, 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. His family noted that “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 acknowledged that he had many more misses than hits over the course of his 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.”
