Bernie Orenstein, the Canadian writer and producer who worked on such sitcoms as That Girl, Sanford and Son, What's Happening!! and Kate   Allie over nearly a half-century in television, died Sept. 14, his family announced. He was 95. Orenstein had his first big success in the 1960s during his three-year stint as a writer on the ABC variety show The Hollywood Palace and shortly after that teamed with Saul Turteltaub for the first time. They would be partners for 30-plus years - even though they rarely worked together in the same room - as one of the most enduring TV comedy teams ever.

 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 said he learned a great deal about comedy from Carl Reiner, who hired him and Turteltaub for the 1971-74 CBS sitcom The New Dick Van Dyke Show.

He and Turteltaub began writing episodes of That Girl in 1967 for its first season, and they served as writer-producers on the ground-breaking ABC feminist comedy for its final two years. (Orenstein said they hurt the show's ratings by having Marlo Thomas' Ann Marie become engaged to her longtime boyfriend, Ted Bessell's Donald Hollinger.)

They would make a similar move after they joined CBS' Kate   Allie in 1988 and got Susan Saint James' 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 came aboard the Redd Foxx-starring Sanford and Son (developed by Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear) as producer-writers in 1974 for the fourth season and stayed through the sitcom's end in 1977.

They had partnered with Yorkin, who had recently split with Lear, to launch TOY Productions, and the new company landed three comedies on ABC: What's Happening!!
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