{"id":749021,"date":"2026-06-20T14:51:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-20T14:51:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/749021\/"},"modified":"2026-06-20T14:51:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-20T14:51:09","slug":"james-burrows-made-tv-feel-like-family-remembering-the-sitcom-master","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/749021\/","title":{"rendered":"James Burrows made TV feel like family: Remembering the sitcom master"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Unlike the movies, where directors get the glory, TV directors sit lower in the hierarchy, below creators, producers and actors. In most series, which might employ several over a season, they are interchangeable \u2014 which isn\u2019t to say they aren\u2019t valuable, transforming words on a page into a four-dimensional living thing. But a director hired to helm a pilot, as James Burrows, who died Friday at 85<\/a>, was again and again \u2014 almost as a lucky charm \u2014 helps set the tone for the series. Jake Kasdan\u2019s input was crucial to the feel (and philosophy) of \u201cFreaks and Geeks,\u201d as Hiro Murai\u2019s<\/a> was to \u201cAtlanta\u201d (and most recently \u201cWidow\u2019s Bay\u201d<\/a>). In some cases a director is a co-creator in all but title and union affiliation. A show might subsequently pass to later hands, but they\u2019ll be honoring its established look and feel.<\/p>\n

But Burrows was more than a little well known. If you sat through the opening credits of \u201cTaxi,\u201d whose pilot he directed along with 74 other episodes \u2014 and why wouldn\u2019t you, with its pleasing Bob James theme and Checker Cab crossing the Queensboro Bridge \u2014 you would have seen his name for weeks on end. You might have noticed it on \u201cCheers,\u201d which he co-created and for which he directed 236 episodes, or on \u201cWill & Grace\u201d (246 episodes), or \u201cFrasier,\u201d \u201cThe Big Bang Theory,\u201d \u201c3rd Rock From the Sun,\u201d \u201cCaroline in the City,\u201d \u201cTwo and a Half Men,\u201d \u201c2 Broke Girls,\u201d<\/a> \u201cThe Neighborhood\u201d<\/a> or, just last year, \u201cMid-Century Modern\u201d<\/a> \u2014 all series whose pilots he directed. You might have caught it on episodes of \u201cThe Mary Tyler Moore Show,\u201d \u201cPhyllis,\u201d \u201cRhoda\u201d or \u201cLaverne & Shirley,\u201d until you began to think that maybe there was nobody else directing network multi-camera situation comedies, the most human of television formats and a specialty from which he rarely strayed.<\/p>\n

And you might have seen him as himself this year in the third season of Lisa Kudrow\u2019s \u201cThe Comeback,\u201d<\/a> as the man she enlists to save a television pilot from hacky AI jokes. \u201cSurprising only comes from a group of writers huddled in a corner, beating themselves up to beat out a better joke,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs director, I am there to help create the ensemble, to do everything I can to foster a community among the company, and to train a new set of actors to behave as a group and respect one another,\u201d he wrote in his 2022 memoir, \u201cDirected by James Burrows.\u201d He famously took the cast of \u201cFriends\u201d to Las Vegas before the show premiered in order to foster bonds in a soon-to-be-impossible state of anonymity. \u201cI guess I have a gift for creating families,\u201d he told the New York Times in 2023.<\/p>\n

But if \u201cFriends\u201d refers to the characters and the people who play them, it includes the audience too. Burrows\u2019 talent was to midwife a real relationship between the viewer and the viewed, \u201cYou want to go where everybody knows your name,\u201d runs the \u201cCheers\u201d theme, and where you know everyone\u2019s name. The families he excelled at creating were yours as well, and one watched knowing that these things happened in real time in real space, and that you could be in the room, if you made the effort. Tickets were available.<\/p>\n

The son of Abe Burrows, who wrote or co-wrote the books for \u201cGuys and Dolls,\u201d \u201cCan-Can\u201d and \u201cHow to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,\u201d and co-created the radio comedy \u201cDuffy\u2019s Tavern\u201d \u2014 set, like \u201cCheers,\u201d in a bar, though the younger Burrows denied any influence \u2014 he\u2019d been directing dinner theater when he had the idea to write to Mary Tyler Moore, whom he\u2019d met on the set of a never-opened \u201cBreakfast at Tiffany\u2019s\u201d musical. His stage experience (and his Yale School of Drama degree, presumably) proved eminently transferable to the proscenium reality of multi-camera situation comedy.<\/p>\n

What Burrows shows share \u2014 the ones we remember, at least, out of many we don\u2019t \u2014 is that they\u2019re fundamentally joyful. They lack cynicism. They\u2019re expressive of their times without being showily edgy. They walk a line between freshness and familiarity, which makes one want to return week after week. They may push an envelope \u2014 \u201cFriends\u201d was something new, after all \u2014 but subtly. We can assume, given his reputation and the fact that he could have retired on \u201cCheers\u201d alone, that he liked what he did and did what he liked, and regard his choice of projects as a form of personal expression in itself, the basis of a body of work that has and will live on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unlike the movies, where directors get the glory, TV directors sit lower in the hierarchy, below creators, producers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":749022,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[9716,64,63,610,359402,21505,134,2582,1868,359403,45755,359838,16645,359839,359837,1160,2349,427,14850],"class_list":["post-749021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-actor","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-burrow","tag-cheers","tag-director","tag-entertainment","tag-family","tag-friend","tag-james-burrows","tag-last-year","tag-most-series","tag-name","tag-network-multi-camera-situation-comedy","tag-other-episode","tag-pilot","tag-show","tag-tv","tag-week"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=749021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749021\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/749022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=749021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=749021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=749021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}