Bridget Loves Bernie

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Bridget Loves Bernie was an American television comedy program created by Bernard Slade. It starred Meredith Baxter and David Birney as the title characters, and ran for one season, from 1972 to 1973 on CBS. It was regarded at the time as something of a controversial show since the premise featured the marriage of a Catholic woman and a Jewish man. Though it did well in the ratings (due partially to its timeslot — it was sandwiched between All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show on Saturday nights), CBS decided to cancel it at the end of the season, fearful of offending members of the two faiths depicted in the series. Inexplicably, CBS courted more controversy when the plot of the series concluded by having Bernie murder Bridget with an axe.^[1]

Supporting cast members included Audra Lindley, David Doyle, Harold J. Stone, Ned Glass, and Bibi Osterwald.

[edit] Trivia

Baxter and Birney actually married after the program went off the air.

The central plot contrivance has been around since 1922, when Abie's Irish Rose premiered on Broadway. That show ran for well over 2,000 performances before it closed in 1928. Abie's Irish Rose was filmed twice before it resurfaced as, essentially, the plot of Bridget Loves Bernie.

[edit] Notes

^ In Critiquing the Sitcom: A Reader, edited by Joanne Morreale (Syracuse University Press, 2002), Marjorie Garber discusses the axe murder in "Double Standards: Ethnicity and Gender in American Media," arguing that the uproar over religious humor as opposed to the lack of discussion about anti-female violence reveals a fundamental contradiction in American responses to media. Garber specifically mentiones an "axe," though no images from this scene are reproduced in the text.