Bridget Loves Bernie is an American television comedy program created by Bernard Slade

Bernard Slade

Bernard Slade is a Canadian playwright and screenwriter.Born in St. Catharines, Ontario, Slade began his career as an actor with the Garden Center Theatre in Vineland, Ontario. In the mid-1960s, he relocated to Hollywood and began to work as a writer for television sitcoms, including Bewitched...

, the creator of the 1970–74 ABC

American Broadcasting Company

The American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...

 sitcom, The Partridge Family

The Partridge Family

The Partridge Family is an American television sitcom about a widowed mother and her five children who embark on a music career. The series originally ran from September 25, 1970 until August 31, 1974, the last new episode airing on March 23, 1974, on the ABC network, as part of a Friday-night lineup...

, based loosely on the premise of the 1920s’ Broadway play and 1940s’ radio show Abie's Irish Rose

Abie's Irish Rose

Abie's Irish Rose is a popular comedy by Anne Nichols familiar from stage productions, films and radio programs. The basic premise involves an Irish Catholic girl and a young Jewish man who marry despite the objections of their families.-Theater and films:...

. It starred Meredith Baxter

Meredith Baxter

Meredith Baxter , also known for some years as Meredith Baxter-Birney, is an American actress and producer. She is known for her acting roles including three television series: Family , an ABC television-network drama, Family Ties , an NBC television-network situation comedy, and Dan Vs. , a...

 and David Birney

David Birney

David Edwin Birney is an American actor/director whose career has performances in both contemporary and classical roles in theatre, film and television. He has three children, a daughter Kate, and twins, Peter and Mollie....

 as the title characters, and ran for one season, from 1972 to 1973 on CBS

CBS

CBS Broadcasting Inc. is a major US commercial broadcasting television network, which started as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network's former name, Columbia Broadcasting System. The network is sometimes referred to as the "Eye Network" in reference to the shape of...

.

Baxter and Birney married in real life after the program went off the air.

Overview

The series was regarded, at the time, as somewhat controversial since the premise featured the marriage between a wealthy Irish Catholic

Irish Catholic

Irish Catholic is a term used to describe people who are both Roman Catholic and Irish .Note: the term is not used to describe a variant of Catholicism. More particularly, it is not a separate creed or sect in the sense that "Anglo-Catholic", "Old Catholic", "Eastern Orthodox Catholic" might be...

 teacher (Bridget) and a Jewish

Jews

The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...

 cab driver (Bernie) whom she met at a bus stop. With a primetime slot between All in the Family

All in the Family

All in the Family is an American sitcom that was originally broadcast on the CBS television network from January 12, 1971, to April 8, 1979. In September 1979, a new show, Archie Bunker's Place, picked up where All in the Family had ended...

and The Mary Tyler Moore Show

The Mary Tyler Moore Show

The Mary Tyler Moore Show is an American television sitcom created by James L. Brooks and Allan Burns that aired on CBS from 1970 to 1977...

on Saturday nights, the situation comedy was ranked fifth in the ratings among all shows for that television season. CBS executives decided to cancel the show in response to hate mail from viewers who objected to the inter-religious marriage depicted on the series. It was the highest-rated television program ever to be canceled after only one season.

Supporting cast members included Audra Lindley

Audra Lindley

Audra Marie Lindley was an American actress, most famous for her role as landlady Helen Roper on the sitcom Three's Company and its spin-off, The Ropers.-Career:...

, David Doyle, Harold J. Stone

Harold J. Stone

Harold J. Stone was an American film and television character actor.Born Harold Hochstein to a Jewish acting family, he began his career on Broadway in 1939 and appeared in five plays in the next six years, including One Touch of Venus and Stalag 17, following which he made his motion picture...

, Ned Glass

Ned Glass

Ned Glass was an American character actor who appeared in more than eighty films and on television more than one hundred times, frequently playing nervous, cowardly or weasely characters...

, and Bibi Osterwald. Lindley and Doyle played Bridget's wealthy parents, Walter and Amy Fitzgerald; while Stone and Osterwald played Bernie's more down-to-earth parents, Sam and Sophie Steinberg, who owned a delicatessen above which Bridget and Bernie lived. Glass played Bernie's uncle Moe Plotnik. Actor Robert Sampson played Father Michael Fitzgerald, a Catholic priest, who was Bridget's brother, and was more sympathetic to his sister's marriage. Bill Elliott played Otis, Bernie's best friend and fellow cab driver.

Episode list

Episode #	Episode title	Original airdate
1-1	"Bridget Loves Bernie" (pilot)	September 16, 1972
1-2	"A Funny Thing Happened On the Way To the Vatican"	September 23, 1972
1-3	"Wake Up, We're Getting Married Today"	September 30, 1972
1-4	"The Last Of the Red Hot Playwrights"	October 7, 1972
1-5	"Who's Watching the Store?"	October 14, 1972
1-6	"The Newlyweds"	October 21, 1972
1-7	"Happiness Is Just A Thing Called Moe"	October 28, 1972
1-8	"Bernie's Last Stand"	November 4, 1972
1-9	"How To Be A Jewish Mother"	November 11, 1972
1-10	"The Little White Lie That Grew and Grew"	November 18, 1972
1-11	"The In-Laws Who Came To Dinner"	November 25, 1972
1-12	"The Homecoming"	December 2, 1972
1-13	"You Are Cordinally Not Invited"	December 9, 1972
1-14	"'Tis the Season"	December 16, 1972
1-15	"Belated Honeymoon"	December 23, 1972
1-16	"Honesty Is the Worst Policy"	January 6, 1973
1-17	"Life Begins At 65"	January 13, 1973
1-18	"With This Ring"	January 20, 1973
1-19	"Into Every Life, A Little Snow Must Fall"	January 27, 1973
1-20	"To Teach Or Not To Teach"	February 3, 1973
1-21	"Painting, Painting- Who's Got the Painting?"	February 10, 1973
1-22	"Steinberg and Son"	February 17, 1973
1-23	"The Information Gap"	February 24, 1973
1-24	"Greener Pastures"	March 3, 1973