Bridget Loves Bernie
 This sitcom from CBS/Screen Gems starred Meredith Baxter as
Bridget Theresa Mary Colleen Fitzgerald - a young school teacher
from a wealthy Catholic Irish-American Republican family.
Cultural and ethnic hilarity ensued when Bridget married hard
working Jewish taxi driver and struggling young writer, Bernie
Steinberg, whose unsophisticated parents live over the top of
their Steinberg's Delicatessen.
The widely divergent ethnic, cultural, and social backgrounds
of the Steinberg and Fitzgerald families, and their attempts to
reconcile for the sake of the young couple, provided most of the
plot situations.
The series scored highly in the ratings at first but was
cancelled after one season, either because the writers were
running out of ideas or because of the controversy it caused,
focusing as it did on the religious divide.
So evidently
convincing was the pairing, however, that Bridget and Bernie fell
in love in real life too, Meredith Baxter and David Birney
marrying in 1973.
The series had been the first on US television to show a
married couple canoodling in bed - obviously it was a particularly
nice feeling. As Meredith Baxter-Birney, the star went on to
headline in Family Ties .
If the Bridget Loves Bernie premise sounds vaguely
familiar, that's because it was a TV adaptation of Abie's Irish
Rose, a comedy play that ran for more than 2300 Broadway
performances from 1922 (in London from 1927), became a novel in
1927, a silent movie in 1928, a US radio series in 1942-44 (taken
off the air following protests about the religious/ethnic
stereotyping) and a talking movie in 1946, directed by Edward A
Sutherland and produced by (but not starring) Bing Crosby.
The premise became even more familiar in 1989 when American TV
viewers had to suffer yet another variation on the theme, Chicken
Soup, a very short-lived debacle for ABC, which, despite
featuring British-born Lynn Redgrave in the cast, has never been
screened in the UK.
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