James Burrows is by far the prominent person in the world of TV comedy director, with 27 nominations all the time in the category versus only 10 for runners Jay Sandrich. But on the heels of the 27th nomination, for Hulus “Mid-Century Modern”, the 84-year-old director does not know optimistic when it comes to his specialty, the once popular but now increasingly marginalized multi-cam sitcoms.
These programs have filmed in front of a live studio audience and controlled Airwaves in previous years and include many of the most successful series in television history. Burrows had a hand in lots of them and directed several episodes of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”, “Cheers”, “Taxi”, “Frasier”, “Friends” and “Will & Grace” and reminds only if the place makes him sadder, since Multi-Cam-Sitcoms have largely been replaced by simple cameras. (Emmy rules, however, still guarantee a nominated multi-cam director if enough section is stated.)
“I’ve been to the funeral for comedy with several cameras about nine times,” Burrows said. “And this time I wear a dark suit.”
He was shaking his head slowly. “It’s really strange that this form has disappeared so much. It’s cheaper to do than any other comedy, and you have to be really fun because you have 300 people who tell you about your joke works or not, not a bunch of writers in front of a TV saying,” Oh, it’s hysterical! “Without audience to confirm that.”
This year, Burrows is particularly disappointed that he is the only person from the “Mid-Century Modern” who receives a nomination. The show itself and its leads, including Nathan Lane (“he is a comic genius”), came up empty -handed. “I bear the burden for all these people,” he said. “The show was wonderful and fun and cordial, and it’s just a shame that no one else was recognized.” And the series has not yet received a second season collection-“not a good sign”-so he is skeptical for its future.
Direction in the multi-cam format, he said, requires “a completely different competence set” from single-cam. “There are many cinematic things in the other comedies, in ‘The Bear’ and ‘hacks’ and ‘The studio’ with these wild camera pictures. I don’t. I did one or two wild camera pictures early in ‘taxi’, but it is not my controlhouse. “
That steering house, he added, has not changed dramatically since leaving his job as theater leader to work with “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” in the mid-1970s. “You get the words, you practice and put the words on their feet, you run it a couple of times, you add what you can to make it more fun,” he said. “You show it to the authors, and they take it and go up and write about based on what they saw. And that’s how it works.”
But the section “Here’s to you, Mrs Schneiderman” by “Mid-Century Modern”, for which Burrows are nominated, needed special treatment. While the series was on holiday in December 2024, Costar Linda Lavin died of a heart attack due to lung cancer complications.
In one of the first episodes after their return, Burrows and the series creator David Kohan and Max Mutchnick had to go a nice line when Bunny Schneiderman (Lane) is told that his mother has died and mourn her with her friends Jerry Frank (Matt Bomer) and Arthur Broussard (Nathan Graham).
“We had to get our grief but be careful not to patos do not screw up comedy,” Burrows said. “The first two scenes are (Bunny) trying to find their Fig Newtons. They have to be really fun and outrageous so that the moment we discover him sitting on the stairs and he says his mother has died, you can buy some time to play pathos.”
The scene, shown about a third of the way through the section, marks a dramatic change. “I think Bomer has a little joke in itself, and it’s a five -minute scene,” Burrows said. “In some normal sitcom you would never do it. But we had the right to do it. And then the last two scenes are really fun, but they are still in the sad phase. Patos are there, but we do not play what we did in one scene where he talks about it.”
Laughter still continues to bring the holes back to TV chambers. “It’s the old Norman Cousins thing,” he said, referring to the journalist who got a few months to live in 1964 but underwent a new treatment that included viewing comedy films and television.
“He saw Marx Brothers and WC Fields bands when he was sick and he got better. I like to think of myself like adding a few years to my life by laughing so hard at these exhibitions.”
This story first appeared in Down to the Wire: Comedy Issue of thewrap’s Awards Magazine. Read more from the question here.
