Bernie Orenstein, Prolific Sitcom Writer and Producer Behind ‘Sanford and Son’ and ‘That Girl,’ Dies at 95
Bernie Orenstein, the Canadian writer and producer whose television career spanned nearly half a century and included work on such beloved sitcoms as That Girl, Sanford and Son, What’s Happening!! and Kate & Allie, has died. He was 95. His family announced that he died on Sept. 14.
Orenstein first found significant success in the 1960s during a three-year stint as a writer on the ABC variety series The Hollywood Palace. Shortly after that, he teamed with Saul Turteltaub for the first time, beginning a partnership that would last more than 30 years. The two became one of the most enduring comedy-writing teams in television history, even though they rarely worked together in the same room.
“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 told Adrienne Faillace 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.”
Orenstein credited Carl Reiner with teaching him a great deal about comedy. Reiner hired Orenstein and Turteltaub to work on the 1971-74 CBS sitcom The New Dick Van Dyke Show, starring Dick Van Dyke as a talk-show host reminiscent of Johnny Carson.
Orenstein and Turteltaub began writing episodes of That Girl in 1967 during its first season, and they later served as writer-producers on the groundbreaking ABC feminist comedy for its final two years. Orenstein acknowledged that the show’s ratings suffered when the writers had Marlo Thomas’s character, Ann Marie, become engaged to her longtime boyfriend, Donald Hollinger, played by Ted Bessell. Years later, they made a similar choice after joining CBS’s Kate & Allie in 1988, when they gave Susan Saint James’s character a husband. “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 joined the Redd Foxx-starring Sanford and Son in 1974 as producer-writers for the show’s fourth season and remained through its end in 1977. The series had been developed by Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear. Orenstein and Turteltaub came aboard at the request of Lear, who needed producers who could handle the temperamental Foxx, who was then sitting out the show amid a contract dispute.
“We got along with him famously,” Orenstein 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.” Once, Orenstein 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.
After 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, giving the character a nickname earned from having to take classes over and over.
Orenstein and Turteltaub had partnered with Bud Yorkin, who had recently split with Norman 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.
The pair also wrote and produced for Love, American Style and Baby Talk, starring Scott Baio, both for ABC. They created CBS’s E/R, featuring Elliott Gould and George Clooney, and wrote for NBC’s One of the Boys, which starred Mickey Rooney alongside young Dana Carvey and Nathan Lane; NBC’s You Again?, with Jack Klugman and John Stamos; and CBS’s Cosby.
They also created Chicken Soup, a 1989 ABC comedy starring Jackie Mason and Lynn Redgrave. The show was canceled, much to Orenstein’s disappointment, after just seven episodes despite having the mega-hit Roseanne as its lead-in. Orenstein later reflected on why the show failed. On Chicken Soup, Mason’s character “was dating a tall, Irish redhead [Redgrave]. He was a short, Jewish guy. I’m a short, Jewish guy. My wife [actress Barbara Rhoades, Orenstein’s wife] is a tall, Irish redhead,” he explained. “I said, ‘It’s perfect, I know everything we can do!’”
“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.”
The youngest of five boys, Bernard Orenstein was born in Toronto on Feb. 5, 1931. He had no middle name. “We were too poor for that,” he joked. His father sold women’s clothing and had a gambling problem, and his mother was a homemaker.
As a youngster, Orenstein acted on CBC radio programs and later appeared on the network’s TV variety shows after dropping out of the University of Toronto. “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. He moved to New York in 1965 and landed on the CBS prank show Candid Camera. He carpooled with another writer, Joan Rivers, until she was fired the day after she appeared on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show and became a hit. Host Allen Funt “didn’t want anyone who was a bigger star, possibly, than he was,” Orenstein said.
Orenstein came to Los Angeles to write for ABC’s The Les Crane Show. When that late-night talk show fell victim to Carson, he persuaded producer Nick Vanoff to let him fulfill his contract on The Hollywood Palace, where he wrote material for the likes of 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 and enlisted Turteltaub, whom he had met in New York, to help. Turteltaub worked on the Boone program while Orenstein stayed with Hollywood Palace and wrote for NBC’s The Monkees. The pair got together in the evenings 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, hiring an unknown Lorne Michaels to lend them a hand.
In 1971, the writers relocated to Arizona to work on The New Dick Van Dyke Show before returning to Los Angeles two years later to produce Love, American Style.
After Columbia Pictures’ Screen Gems bought TOY Productions — the sale went through in 1979 on the same day What’s Happening!!, Carter Country and 13 Queens Boulevard were canceled — Orenstein and Turteltaub worked for Columbia on One of the Boys and One in a Million, starring What’s Happening!! actress Shirley Hemphill. The two later helped future Murphy Brown creator Diane English gain a foothold in television by executive producing her 1985-86 CBS comedy, Foley Square.
After he and Turteltaub spent 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 also taught TV history at Long Island University in Brooklyn and bred thoroughbreds.
In addition to his second wife, actress Barbara Rhoades, whom he married in February 1979, survivors include 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. “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.”
