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 โ which isnโt to say they arenโt 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, was again and again โ almost as a lucky charm โ helps set the tone for the series. Jake Kasdanโs input was crucial to the feel (and philosophy) of โFreaks and Geeks,โ as Hiro Muraiโs was to โAtlantaโ (and most recently โWidowโs Bayโ). 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 theyโll be honoring its established look and feel.
But Burrows was more than a little well known. If you sat through the opening credits of โTaxi,โ whose pilot he directed along with 74 other episodes โ and why wouldnโt you, with its pleasing Bob James theme and Checker Cab crossing the Queensboro Bridge โ you would have seen his name for weeks on end. You might have noticed it on โCheers,โ which he co-created and for which he directed 236 episodes, or on โWill & Graceโ (246 episodes), or โFrasier,โ โThe Big Bang Theory,โ โ3rd Rock From the Sun,โ โCaroline in the City,โ โTwo and a Half Men,โ โ2 Broke Girls,โ โThe Neighborhoodโ or, just last year, โMid-Century Modernโ โ all series whose pilots he directed. You might have caught it on episodes of โThe Mary Tyler Moore Show,โ โPhyllis,โ โRhodaโ or โLaverne & Shirley,โ 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.
And you might have seen him as himself this year in the third season of Lisa Kudrowโs โThe Comeback,โ as the man she enlists to save a television pilot from hacky AI jokes. โSurprising only comes from a group of writers huddled in a corner, beating themselves up to beat out a better joke,โ he says.
โAs 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,โ he wrote in his 2022 memoir, โDirected by James Burrows.โ He famously took the cast of โFriendsโ to Las Vegas before the show premiered in order to foster bonds in a soon-to-be-impossible state of anonymity. โI guess I have a gift for creating families,โ he told the New York Times in 2023.
But if โFriendsโ refers to the characters and the people who play them, it includes the audience too. Burrowsโ talent was to midwife a real relationship between the viewer and the viewed, โYou want to go where everybody knows your name,โ runs the โCheersโ theme, and where you know everyoneโs 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.
The son of Abe Burrows, who wrote or co-wrote the books for โGuys and Dolls,โ โCan-Canโ and โHow to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,โ and co-created the radio comedy โDuffyโs Tavernโ โ set, like โCheers,โ in a bar, though the younger Burrows denied any influence โ heโd been directing dinner theater when he had the idea to write to Mary Tyler Moore, whom heโd met on the set of a never-opened โBreakfast at Tiffanyโsโ musical. His stage experience (and his Yale School of Drama degree, presumably) proved eminently transferable to the proscenium reality of multi-camera situation comedy.
What Burrows shows share โ the ones we remember, at least, out of many we donโt โ is that theyโre fundamentally joyful. They lack cynicism. Theyโre 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 โ โFriendsโ was something new, after all โ but subtly. We can assume, given his reputation and the fact that he could have retired on โCheersโ 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.