{"id":398403,"date":"2026-04-14T18:59:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-14T18:59:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/398403\/"},"modified":"2026-04-14T18:59:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T18:59:08","slug":"james-burrows-brought-something-vital-to-lisa-kudrows-hbo-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/398403\/","title":{"rendered":"James Burrows brought something vital to Lisa Kudrow\u2019s HBO show."},"content":{"rendered":"

James Burrows is the rare figure for whom the word\u00a0legend\u00a0seems woefully insufficient. A sitcom veteran whose credits stretch all the way back to\u00a0The Mary Tyler Moore Show, he was, with one exception, nominated for an Emmy every year between 1980 and 2005\u2014a period during which he directed 237 episodes of\u00a0Cheers and shot the pilots for\u00a0Friends,\u00a0Frasier, and\u00a0Will & Grace. His 2022 memoir,\u00a0Directed by James Burrows<\/a>, overflows with casually dispensed bits of wisdom\u2014it\u2019s the multicamera equivalent of\u00a0Sidney Lumet\u2019s\u00a0Making Movies<\/a>\u2014and reveals him to be not just one of the most successful but one of the most thoughtful craftsmen the television medium has ever known.<\/p>\n

And yet, it\u2019s one of his rare on-camera roles\u00a0that gets him stopped on the street. As he said on\u00a0an HBO podcast<\/a>\u00a0a couple of weeks ago, when people come up to tell him they love his work, he\u2019ll respond with a self-effacing, \u201cThank you, thank you\u2014yeah, I did\u00a0Cheers, I did\u00a0Friends.\u201d And they\u2019ll say, \u201cNo, I loved you on\u00a0The Comeback.\u201d<\/p>\n

Burrows\u2019 role on\u00a0The Comeback, where he plays a thinly veiled version of himself, isn\u2019t a big one. Over the course of the HBO sitcom\u2019s three seasons, which have materialized once a decade since 2005, he\u2019s only appeared in eight episodes, sometimes for no more than a single scene. And yet he serves a critical function in its overarching story about the travails of an aging TV actress, one that\u2019s made his brief appearances both memorable and often surprisingly moving. As co-creator Michael Patrick King\u00a0puts it<\/a>, \u201cJimmy represents the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although Burrows talks about \u201cJimmy the director\u201d as if there\u2019s a distinction, his Comeback character is deeply informed by his real-life history, not just in the industry but with the show\u2019s star, Lisa Kudrow. As Michael Schulman\u2019s recent\u00a0Kudrow profile<\/a>\u00a0for the New Yorker points out, Burrows helped cement Kudrow in the role that would change her life, flying the entire cast of\u00a0Friends\u00a0to Las Vegas after they finished shooting the pilot for what he informed them would be their last taste of anonymity. But he also directed the original pilot for\u00a0Frasier, where Kudrow was cast and then replaced in the role of the hard-charging radio producer Roz, which eventually went to Peri Gilpin. According to\u00a0Directed By, when he was gearing up for the\u00a0Friends\u00a0pilot, word got back to Burrows that Kudrow had been expressing her displeasure behind his back: \u201cThat fucking Jimmy Burrows is directing the show?\u201d<\/p>\n

Time has borne out Burrows\u2019 judgement. And on\u00a0The Comeback, his unofficial role is that of TV-industry sage. In the show\u2019s first season, Kudrow\u2019s washed-up sitcom star, Valerie Cherish, gets a shot at re-grasping the brass ring when she\u2019s cast on a show called\u00a0Room and Bored. She\u2019s thrilled to learn that Jimmy will be directing the pilot, but has trouble adjusting to the fact that she\u2019s no longer the sexy young lead she was on her breakthrough show, an \u201980s workplace comedy called\u00a0I\u2019m It!\u00a0In the imagination of the\u00a0Room and Bored writers, two frat-boy hotshots in their 20s, a woman in her 40s can only be a dried-up old hag, and the more Valerie tries to fight for her character\u2019s dignity, the more they douse her in humiliation. (At one point, Valerie\u2019s Aunt Sassy busts in on the show\u2019s real star, played by Malin Akerman, getting a tongue bath from an adorable puppy, and the writers have her yell, \u201cI haven\u2019t been licked like that since 1943!\u201d) Jimmy knows there\u2019s no saving this show, but he also knows Valerie is only hurting herself by trying to buck the egos of its creators, for whom she represents exactly the kind of corny, heavy-handed comedy they\u2019re trying to distinguish themselves from. When she protests that the writers on\u00a0I\u2019m It!\u00a0always took her notes, Jimmy pulls her aside, because he realizes he\u2019s the only person in her life who will level with her. \u201cYou know what?\u201d he tells her. \u201cYou\u2019re not\u00a0it anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

Burrows, who, with his longtime creative partners Glen and Les Charles, was instrumental in reorienting American sitcoms around ongoing storylines with greater emotional investment, was put off at first by\u00a0The Comeback\u2019s caustic tone. He recalls asking King, who he knew from the latter\u2019s days in the\u00a0Will and Grace writers\u2019 room, \u201cShe gets shit on at every moment\u2014can she have a moment of redemption?\u201d King responded, \u201cNo. I don\u2019t do that.\u201d But Burrows\u2019 character has often been the series\u2019 vehicle for those hard-won moments, which are like tiny cups of water in an emotional marathon.<\/p>\n

In the second season, Valerie reinvents herself as a serious actress, starring on a prestige drama about a sitcom writer struggling with his heroin addiction and his show\u2019s temperamental star. Valerie\u2019s not crazy about the job, in part because the new show\u2019s creator is one of\u00a0Room and Bored\u2019s writers and the character she\u2019s playing is plainly an unflattering caricature of herself. But she perseveres, even as her marriage is falling apart and her beloved hairstylist, Mickey (Robert Michael Morris), is struggling with health issues. By the end of the season, she\u2019s made it all the way to an Emmy nomination, but she ends up at the awards ceremony alone, because Mickey\u2019s in the hospital and her husband has moved out. Desperate for someone to share her moment of glory with, she makes a beeline for her old pal, Jimmy. They\u2019ve never really been close\u2014she has to remind Jimmy of her husband\u2019s name\u2014but when she implies that the nomination makes up for all her personal sacrifices, he takes the opportunity to set her straight, telling her, \u201cIt\u2019s important, but it\u2019s not as important as that. This is one night. A great night. But only one night.\u201d Valerie takes the hint: She runs to Mickey\u2019s bedside, where her husband is pleasantly shocked to see her pass up professional validation to care for someone she loves. (Because this satire of Hollywood is still a product of it, she wins the Emmy anyway.)<\/p>\n

The Comeback\u2019s third and final season brings Jimmy the director face to face with an existential threat to his livelihood: generative A.I. Valerie\u2019s latest vehicle is a show called\u00a0How\u2019s That?!, which will be the first TV show written entirely by A.I. Jimmy, who Valerie coaxes out of retirement to direct the pilot, is startled when he learns the closely guarded secret behind the show\u2019s authorship, and more so when he first sees the A.I. at work. \u201cWell, that\u2019s upsetting,\u201d he remarks after it acts to fill in a missing character beat in the pilot script. \u201cThat machine wrote a pretty good scene in 10 minutes.\u201d Given that the season opens with the\u00a02023 Writers Guild strike<\/a>, which was propelled in part by fears that the studios would use A.I. to replace human writers, his response generates a frisson of real alarm\u2014if A.I. can write a scene good enough for James Burrows, maybe we really are in trouble.<\/p>\n

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If you know James Burrows is one of the greats, though, that \u201cpretty good\u201d is a dead giveaway. In this season\u2019s fourth episode, which aired on Sunday, Valerie shoots the pilot for\u00a0How\u2019s That?!\u00a0in front of a live audience, where the \u201cblow\u201d\u2014the big final joke that\u2019s meant to tie a bow on the cold open\u2014audibly falls flat. The showrunners, a married couple (John Early and Abbi Jacobson) who are essentially putting up a false front in order to keep the writers\u2019 union in the dark, want to move on; it\u2019s funny enough, and besides, they\u2019ve got a sitter waiting at home. But Jimmy won\u2019t have it. This is the first scene of the first episode, and if it doesn\u2019t end with a big laugh, the audience is gone. Within seconds, the A.I. generates a dozen alternatives, and Jimmy selects No. 4, which draws enough of an appreciative chuckle for him to call it a wrap.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s gone about as well as it can go, and Valerie is eager to get Jimmy to commit to further episodes. But he\u2019s done\u2014with the show, and maybe, if this is the way things are going to go, with television itself. Val protests, \u201cBut tonight was so good!\u201d And Jimmy responds with a monologue that is as close as this slippery, acidic show has come to laying its cards on the table:<\/p>\n

Good, but never gonna be great. \u2026 The machine is fast and cooperative. I\u2019ll give it that. But I saw every one of those jokes coming, and so did you. Surprising only comes from a group of writers huddled in a corner, beating themselves up to beat out a better joke. The chubby guy who\u2019s a secret alcoholic. It\u2019s the gay guy who, despite all the work he\u2019s done, still hates himself a little. Or the funny woman who\u2019s been invisible for way too long. They turn all that pain into a joke. Those broken, beautiful souls are what make something great. And you didn\u2019t see it coming.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As King admits, this is almost embarrassingly on the nose, a writer making a self-interested case for the importance of human writers. It helps, in a way, that Burrows isn\u2019t an actor, that he\u2019s disinclined to\u2014and possibly incapable of\u2014milking the emotion out of his big speech. Its weight comes from King\u2019s writing and Burrows\u2019 unmatched experience. No one is better qualified to judge what separates a serviceable sitcom from a genuinely inspired one, the pretty good from the great.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not clear that Burrows, whose autobiography is full of happy sets and lifelong friendships, puts any stock in the notion that you have to suffer to make something great. There\u2019s a kind of mythological tautology to the idea that comedy can only come from pain\u2014pain which A.I. is definitionally incapable of experiencing. But Burrows does say that the unhappiness of his parents\u2019 divorce is part of what drove him to create such happy onscreen families, whether or not the characters were related by blood.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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Over the decades,\u00a0The Comeback\u00a0has become as much a show about the fate of the sitcom as it is the trials and triumphs of its beleaguered heroine. Like Valerie, the show has changed with the times, tweaking its format and framing to take on the most pressing threat to the comedic half-hour\u2019s existence: reality TV, prestige drama, A.I. But Burrows has always been true to the classic multicamera format, with its broad and bawdy humor, its primal connection to a live studio audience that just wants 20-odd minutes of relief. And he concludes, finally, that if the industry is content to turn out inhuman mediocrities, he\u2019d just as soon take his leave. He\u2019s got a \u201cfun clause\u201d in his contract, he tells Valerie, and this isn\u2019t fun anymore.<\/p>\n

Valerie ignores him, of course. The season is only half over, and she still has things to learn. But Jimmy has taught her everything he has to teach. From here on out, the mistakes are all hers.<\/p>\n

Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"James Burrows is the rare figure for whom the word\u00a0legend\u00a0seems woefully insufficient. A sitcom veteran whose credits stretch…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":398404,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[218,1049,93,3284,61,60,282],"class_list":{"0":"post-398403","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-artificial-intelligence","9":"tag-comedy","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-hbo","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398403\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/398404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}