Bernie Orenstein, whose TV career spanned writing for Candid Camera to writing and producing That Girl, The New Dick Van Dyke Show, Sanford & Son, What’s Happening!!, Kate & Allie and others, has died. He was 95.
His family said Orenstein died September 14 but did not provide details.
Orenstein had been a writer on Alan Funt’s hidden-camera show Candid Camera in the 1960s when he began penning episodes of sitcoms and variety shows including The Monkees, The Roger Miller Show, Accidental Family, Away We Go — which featured a young George Carlin — and Hey, Landlord. His breakout gig was as a scribe for ABC’s big-budget variety show The Hollywood Palace from 1965-68. That would be Orenstein’s first project with his eventual longtime writing and producing partner Saul Turteltaub.
Together, they wrote and produced such TV fare as That Girl — led by Marlo Thomas — The New Dick Van Dyke Show and The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show. Orenstein and Turteltaub also worked on episodes of the campy anthology comedy Love, American Style before becoming writer-producers on the classic Redd Foxx sitcom Sanford & Son in 1974. That season, the NBC comedy finished second behind All in the Family in the year-end primetime ratings, and ranking No. 7 in 1975-76.
They remained with the show until its 1977 wrap, also working on its short-lived spinoff Grady and shorter-lived continuation series The Sanford Arms, which aired a handful of episodes with much of the Sanford & Son cast sans its stars. Foxx had moved on to his own NBC variety series, and Demond Wilson left amid a salary dispute.
Orenstein and Turteltaub’s next big show was ABC’s What’s Happening!!, an urban comedy that debuted in 1976. Taking a cue from Norman Lear’s wildly popular shows of the era, first season was popular, ranking No. 25 in primetime year-end ratings in the three-network universe. But subsequent seasons were less successful, and the show ended in 1979.
The duo would continue to write and produce TV series and specials well into the 1990s, creating the single-season 1982 Mickey Rooney-Dana Carvey sitcom One of the Boys and working on such ’80s shows as One in a Million, Double Trouble, E/R, Foley Square and You Again? Their biggest series that decade was Kate & Allie, the CBS comedy starring Susan Saint James and SNL original Jane Curtin as divorced best friends sharing a Greenwich Village apartment. Orenstein and Turteltaub served as EPs and writers for its final season in 1988-89.
Partners for more than three decades, they would go on to write and produce for the 1990s comedies Baby Talk and Cosby, the latter being Orenstein’s final screen credit.
Born on February 5, 1931, in Toronto, Orenstein got his start in TV in the 1950s as an actor on the Canadian shows Encounter and On Camera. He later would have bit roles on Sanford & Son, That Girl and The New Dick Van Dyke Show.
“As a writer there’s a great advantage,” Orenstein said in a 2016 interview with the TV Academy Foundation. “You’re never out of work. You can always sit down at the typewriter or computer.”
You can watch that interview here: