Bernard Slade

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Bernard Slade Newbound (1930-2019) was a Canadian playwright and long-time Hollywood TV-sitcom writer. He began his career as an actor performing in over 200 plays on stage, radio and television in regional theatres around Toronto and on camera for the CBC.

He moved to Hollywood in the mid-1960s and was soon writing episodes of such classics-to-be as Bewitched. Credited as creator, writer, story editor and producer of eight series, including Love on a Rooftop, The Flying Nun, The Partridge Family, The Girl With Something Extra and Bridget and Bertie, he was considered one of the true heavyweights in Hollywood. By the mid-1970s, he turned his comedic genius to the stage writing more than a dozen plays, including his three Broadway hit shows Same Time, Next Year; Tribute and Romantic Comedy, which were all turned into Hollywood features.

Same Time, Next Year, starring Charles Grodin and Ellen Burstyn, opened in 1975 and immediately became a major Broadway hit, running for 1,453 performances. Slade received the Drama Desk Award and a Tony Award nomination for Best Play. In 1978 he adapted his script into a movie, which starred Ellen Burstyn and Alan Alda and was nominated for four Oscars.

Clive Barnes wrote in the New York Times: “What puts the final icing on Mr. Slade’s wonderfully confectioned cake, is the way in which he contrives to give us a social history of the United States during the past quarter‐century. His eye and ear for salient detail are sure, and the period feel is assisted by the evocative use of nostalgic tapes (speeches, songs, sports broadcasts of the period) between the scenes. Clever, clever, Mr. Slade.”

In 1979, as his play Romantic Comedy was getting ready to open, Bernard Slade stated in an interview with The Times: “Writing for theater is very public. You put it on the line each time. Elsewhere you’re as good as your best play, but in America you seem to be only as good as your last.”