COMEDY ALL-STARS

How legendary sitcom director James Burrows spins classic TV gold

- JIM HALTERMAN

ON A JUNE afternoon in Austin, a clip reel of scenes from comedies like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laverne & Shirley, Cheers and Friends has an audience at the annual ATX Television Festival howling with laughter. But one person watches with tears in his eyes: TV veteran James Burrows (below), who, over the span of a five-decade career, directed all these famous faces—Moore, Ted Danson and Shelley Long, Kelsey Grammer and Jennifer Aniston—and helped shaped their now-classic sitcoms into the shows we know and love.

As ATX honored Burrows, 82, with the festival’s Achievement in Television Excellence award, TV GUIDE MAGAZINE’s West Coast bureau chief moderated a discussion with the 11-time (!) Emmy winner. It was a walk down memory lane that included everything from his first big break to the secret of his directing success to whether we’ll ever see a Cheers reboot.

Your career started in the theater with your writer-director father, Abe Burrows. How much did that impact you being a TV director?

What I do, the multi-camera situational comedy in front of a live audience, is theater; it’s not television. Everything has to do with staging a play and the reaction of the actors. Then the last two days, I bring in cameras to cover the play. It’s all about pleasing the audience, and you’ve got to make them laugh. We never had fake laughter on Cheers because if a joke didn’t work, [the writers] changed the joke.