Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend - James Burrows

Episode Date: September 5, 2022

Legendary sitcom director James Burrows feels sanguine about being Conan O’Brien’s friend. James sits down with Conan to talk about his new book Directed by James Burrows, casting for Cheers and Frasier, which of his shows he still thinks is the funniest, and the evolution of the Norm-ism. Plus, Conan tries to get to know his own feet a bit better.  Got a question for Conan? Call our voicemail: [phone]. For Conan videos, tour dates and more visit TeamCoco.com.

Hi, my name is James Burroughs and I feel sanguine about being Conan O'Brien's friend. No one's ever used sanguine. No, I think that's the first. We've had people be cautiously optimistic. President Obama? President Obama was cautiously optimistic and it turned out to be true. He's never spoken to me since. Fall is here, hear the yell, back to school, ring the bell, brand new shoes, walk in the

lose, climb the fence, books and pens, I can tell that we are gonna be friends. I can tell that we are gonna be friends. Hey everybody, welcome to Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend, joined by my good companions, my chums, my chos. Chos? Yeah, chos. Chos? Yeah, chos.

Chos. That's cool. Brums and chos. Yeah. Sonoma Sessian, Matt Gurley. Hi, gang. What's up, chos? Hey.

You know, it's so funny because we always chat for a while, you know, take these weird mind journeys together and then eventually I announce who the guest is. But I was just looking at it right now and thinking, what if like three years from now we've just, we're starting to phone it in? Because we're not. We're still giving it our all. It's a passion project. You guys are, you guys still are.

Oh, you're not. Well, you were phoning it in six years before we started the podcast. Many times, often on an actual phone. Yeah. Okay, yeah. But what if, you know, it's like, hey, this is Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend, James Burroughs is on the show, let's kill. There was no talk beforehand.

Let's see how we could do the fastest one possible where we say hi and say the name. How about this? Here we go. Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend. Sonoma. Hi. James Burroughs. Yeah.

Nice. I think we can do even faster. Okay. C.O.B. needs friends. Sonoma. Matt. Hi. James Burroughs.

Yeah. I didn't say a word. You said, you said. I got nervous. I got really nervous. But I think, do you think there's ever going to be... I can do it even better. Oh, okay.

Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend. Matt. Hi. James Burroughs. Oh. And then I bring up Sonoma later. Wait, why? Not in the intro.

I don't know. We saved time. Are we going to have beef? Oh, what if that happens? No, they got back together again. Didn't they? Yeah, but like... I mean...

What do you think the beef will be? I don't know. What do you think is the... Maybe it should be over actual beef. I think it would be terrific if I found out, here's the beef. The beef is I find out that Sonoma is using our new podcast building to store beef. That's why it's so cold. You're getting beef through some uncle.

Where's this beef? This is Yerevan beef. The finest beef from Yerevan. It's good beef. And everyone wants their beef from Yerevan. Everyone wants Yerevan beef. And you have found that in the edit room downstairs, it's cool enough to store beef. And you're using it, and some of it runs, and the juices short out.

Short out our video systems and various technological advances. You're going to figure out like wiring and like lingo. Wires and tubes and such. You know what, we'll never have a beef. You know why? Because we always have beef. You know what I mean? All we do is fight.

Yeah. So this thing falls apart when we get along. Right. So we can never let that happen. I don't think that's a problem. I think it's going to be okay. I think we're going to be fine. I think we're going to be more than fine.

And I don't... I think we should... You know, we're not going to fold it in because we're always searching, always searching for new things to talk about, and it just seems to happen organically with us. We never know what we're going to talk about. And then before you know it, we've taken some crazy cerebral journey that's explained space-time continuum. And we didn't even know what...

I don't think we've ever done that. I never did that. I don't think we've ever done anything like that. We've talked about scrotums. Yeah. And space porn. Yeah. And lot's of jizz.

I talk about, yeah, the family I grew up with a lot. Yeah. We do. Yeah. Some dysfunctional stuff. Yeah. Yeah. No.

It's really nothing that contributes to society in any way. Yeah. Mm. You know what I mean? You know what I mean? Jim Burroughs? Well, my guest today has directed more than 1,000 episodes of sitcom television, including... This is an insane list.

Such iconic shows as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, Cheers, Friends, and Will and Grace. He's won 11 Emmys for his work. That's too many Emmys, I think. Yeah. He should give some away. He's won 11 Emmys for his work and now has a new book directed by James Burroughs. And I really love this book because it talks about so many of the TV shows that influenced

me and have meant so much to me. So very cool. You see, I'm thrilled. He's in the building. James Burroughs, welcome. This is a delight for me. I owe you a great debt of thanks as to anyone who's listening because you have been a force behind so many of my favorite television shows that influenced me, made me want to get into

television, changed my life. Bob Newhart and Mary Tyler Moore Show were the shows that I got to watch. I believe it was Saturday night and it was a huge deal. It's when people watch television on Saturday night. They don't do that anymore. No. And we used to. It's very hard to explain to people.

I'm not going to sound like an old man, but it was a ritual. We would gather around the television set and we would fight for who gets to sit. We grew up in a kooky old. It's a wonderful life house and it had an iron heating grate and you wonder if you could get on that. There was six kids. If you could get on the iron heating grate. It was a good thing.

Sorry. Which Dickens character? I had my fingerless gloves. I was an accountant and a pickpocket. But I would watch, we would watch Mary Tyler Moore or we would watch Bob Newhart. Those shows were really important to me and it's so stunning to read your book, which I absolutely love. But your book directed by James Burroughs, which is out there and definitely worth grabbing.

I look at it and I think you could have written a book just about working on Mary Tyler Moore and doing some episodes of Bob Newhart. That's a book I would read. Then you go on. You have the gall to go on and help create cheers and direct pretty much every cheers episode, then again, you should, you know, enough. But Taxi, Frazier, Friends, Will and Grace, I love the comeback and your appearance in the comeback is as some version of yourself.

And you were fantastic in that role. I'm hard pressed to think of someone else who can reference their work and appeal to someone that my parents would say, oh, my God, I love those shows. I love those shows. And then you could talk to any punk kid today and they'd say, wait a minute, you worked on Will and Grace and Friends. There's a continuity there that's unheard of. Yeah.

Yeah. It's going to be in a couple of years. It'll be 50 years. Wow. Because I started in 74. The Mary Tyler Moore show was my first show. I had nothing to do with it. I came in the third year, the fourth year, it had already been established and Newhart

was the same. I was just a guest director on those shows. So I do credit them in my book, but I had little to do with the formulation. But I did get a chance to direct those wonderful actors. What's clear to me in reading the book is that your father, a boroughs this incredibly talented man who'd worked in show business, he's a writer, he's a performer, knew everybody. He said that when you were a kid, you didn't quite know where you fit into the equation. You liked music.

You had an ear for music. And I feel like that is the through line to me of the book is you developed an ear, I think, early on. And then by working on these incredible shows early on, you picked up and helped develop this sense of rhythm that is, I think, essential to all your work. Yeah, essential to all comedy. Yeah. As you know, comedy is all rhythm.

You can give a person who's not funny a line to read a joke, and they will put the emphasis on the wrong syllable. Can we fix that in editing, though? It'd be great if we fixed that. So you can't learn that. You have to be born with that. You can certainly learn the technical aspects of how to film a sitcom because you're doing a play and filming a play.

But you can't learn the funny and the funny is music. And I talk in the book about my father, when he was doing straight plays, would walk backstage and he'd listen with his ear. He wouldn't see the actors. He'd listen with his ear and he'd listen to the rhythms. And he once said to me, he would do that, and then if he heard a pause, he knew nobody was dancing so he knew he was in trouble. So at times, I don't even look at the monitors.

I don't even look at the actors. I just close my eyes and just try to hear the rhythms and try to prevent an actor on the way to the joke of screwing up the joke because 90% of humor is surprise. So if an actor gets the joke wrong, going to it, when he gets it right, the audience is not going to laugh as hard because he's already screwed up the joke. So that's my job, really, because you're in front of a live audience and you want to protect the humor. But it is musical.

You know, I was sung when I was 12 years old, I auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera Boys' Chorus and I think America the Beautiful and I got in. And for five years, I was a boy soprano in all the operas at the Metropolitan Opera. So that was more musical for me and I play bad piano. Which is surprisingly much harder than good piano. Very difficult to play the piano bad. My dad was going into surgery and I think this is attributed to him or not and he said to the doctor on the way in, will I be able to play the piano?

And the doctor said, absolutely, he said good because I couldn't play it before. It's funny though because in reading your book, you know, Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, these are in a way your apprenticeship shows and I'm hard pressed to think of better rhythmic shows at that time. If you think about Bob Newhart's rhythm and I've had the great honor of getting to know him and be friends with him, you know, in my career and anytime the phone rings and it's Bob, I am transported. I mean, I just feel you've probably had this a million times over but I just think I don't

care what happens to me now. I made it that the phone rang and it's Bob Newhart on the other end of the line. He is still as sharp and funny as ever and that rhythm, that rhythm that he established on his early records, bottom down mind, I know those were influential to you. It's just as good today as it was in 1962, you know, just as funny. Yeah, my dad, my dad sent me Bob's record and he also sent me to 2000 year old man when I was in college, I think in 1960 and I was, I was all of a sudden the hub of the dorm because all these guys from, you know, at the college in Ohio and Oberlin and these

guys who didn't grow up in New York City and, you know, came to Oberlin because it was very ecumenical from all around the country and they would just sit there and roar, especially at 2000 year old man. And so the fact that I got to work with Newhart was just because I was such a fan of his. Just, you know, I don't know if it's in the book but the great line, one of the producers said to him, I think in the pilot said to him, can you not stammer so much? Yeah. And he said, that stammer built a house in Beverly Hills.

He also loves to tell the story of one of his early records, the audio engineer and listen up here, Eduardo, but the audio engineer heard these long pauses in little stammers and took them out. And Bob Newhart and went back and went, same idea. You're screwing with the formula here. You leave those in. I mean, he was amazing and, you know, also he did warm up in a multi-camera sitcom. There's an audience and the audience has to be warmed up before the, I'm sure when you

were doing your show, you had a guy warm up the audience. And Newhart would do that. Newhart would come out and tell the para joke, the same para joke and the audience would, you know, just go crazy. And he was, it was amazing. He's such a sweet man and still with us and still with it. Yes. Yeah.

And still as funny as ever. So your career moves along and the, what's clear to me reading the book is that probably, I mean, it's your first massive success in a long string of massive successes. But the one I think that still feels most near and dear to your heart is Cheers. Because you help formulate that show with Glenn and Les Charles. You help make that show and you're there and you're putting the whole thing together. And this is, you read your account of it and it sounds like just the perfect experience all the way through cast, writers, the way it was received once it's beloved.

It just felt joyous the whole ride. It was, it was a wonderful experience. I met the boys, I met the, I called them the boys, the brothers on Phyllis. They were story editors and I was the permanent director the first, first year. And so I met them then and then we reconnected on Taxi. They were the producers and I was the director of Taxi, which was, you know, a wonderfully funny show, but it was just, it was really hard. It was the first time I used four cameras and I had this cast that was into planetary

and so we went through a lot and at that point, you know, Jim Brooks, Jim Brooks, who was one of the great comedy minds and going to great comedy writers was also doing a movie. So he wasn't there on certain days and, you know, there were other producers who had certain ideas and Jim had certain. So it was, it was, you know, the show turned out fine, but it was really difficult. And then we, we, we started to talk about doing our own show. We had the same agent who said, you guys should do your own show. And in the book I talk about, you know, we love faulty towers and we thought about a

hotel and then we thought about the bar and then we thought about a bar in Barstow. And then we thought we do, we're all sports fans, so we're going to do something in Boston or Philadelphia. We chose Boston. We formulated these characters and the original conception of the show, believe it or not, was Sam Malone, the Lothario working for a woman. So the boys went off to write the script and I went on my first honeymoon and I came back home.

The script was on my doorstep. I read it and I said, you brought radio back to television because it was so literate and they had created this character of Diane Chambers. I had nothing to do with it. That was all their work and it was so smooth, it was scary how the process went. We, you know, I knew about Teddy because I had auditioned him for Best of the West and Shelley Long had been out there and people had been trying to get her. So they both fell in and they wrote the part for Rhea because they knew Rhea from Taxi

and it just went so smoothly and we had to deal with NBC. We got to do two pilots and they would have to make one and this was the first pilot and we had big fans at NBC. Grant Tinker was brought in to run it who brought me out to California and Brandon Tarnacoff who was my close friend was there. So it went great and we debuted like in 70th place. Nobody watched us. There was no reason to watch us but the rest is history.

Quick note, you bring up Grant Tinker who was married to Maritela Moore and ran that company. MTM. MTM. Yeah. I mean, they both hired the creative people and left them alone and that doesn't go on anymore. When you get networked notes on a show, I said if you guys knew what you're doing, you'd

have nothing but hits on the air. So back in those days, it was hire these guys, these guys coming off taxi who had been trained for six or seven years doing multi-camera sitcom and let them do the work and that doesn't go on anymore. Grant Tinker I always tried to have some sense of compassion about this or empathy because I realized that if you hire a bunch of people and you pay them a lot of money to give notes, they're going to give notes because they have to.

MTM. They have to assert themselves in some ways. It's never an innovative note. It's always an imitative note. We've had success before with this kind of character. So why don't we go back to that? If their notes would make shows all homogeneous and not, you know, not, you'd never been doing a Will and Grace.

You'd never, we would never gotten away with cheers or taxi or, you know, unless you're, we had with Glenn and Les and with Jim Brooks and people like that. They just told the network, okay, fine, goodbye, you know, we'll do it. So you can see the product now is not as good as it was. Grant Tinker There used to be a rule in sitcoms, a diehard rule. I'm talking about the 1950s, 60s that you always have to, the episode needs to end where it started.

The world can't change. I always use the example of Gilligan's Island at the end of the episode. They're still on the island. They have to still be on the island and that was a, that was just one of the rules that was a solid rule of television for a long time and then it starts to change. And you're part of that change of, no, we don't end up always at the same place where we left off. Things evolve.

That felt like a, a huge shift. Grant Tinker Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Well, at the end of the first year, we have that great scene where they kiss and we had to, we knew we were going to get them together the second year. There was, you know, no more keys and we had to get them together because if Sam alone couldn't bet a woman in a year, what kind of stud is he?

Grant Tinker Yes. Grant Tinker Right. Grant Tinker Okay. So we were excoriated for that. I still have Howard Rosenberg's review in the LA Times who said the show is over.

It's lost to magic. But we said, we didn't care. We knew we had to be evolving. We knew we had to get them together and break them up, get them together and break them up. And we knew that at the end of every year, we would, the boys would write themselves into a corner. They'd break them up somehow and then figure out in the summer how to get them back together

again or not. And it yielded, you know, I mean when, at the end of the second year when Diane flips out and goes into a loony bin in the first episode of third year, she brings her doctor into cheers who has told her, go back and confront your demons. And the doctor was Fraser Crane. And so that's what happened. And you know, we finally, when Shelley decided she didn't want to do the show anymore, we had to in essence break them up and go back to the original conception of the show when

we sat around talking about it, which is Sam working for a woman. Grant Tinker Yeah. Chris D'Ali comes in and he has to work for her. And I didn't realize that was the original idea. But it's such a good, such a good idea. You could flip and putting them, you didn't try and recreate Shelley Long's role with someone else.

Grant Tinker How can you? No. You know who became Diane? Fraser. Chris D'Ali Yeah. Grant Tinker

Fraser did all the upscale jokes. Chris D'Ali Yeah. Grant Tinker And Bebe and Lilith Sternick. Chris D'Ali Right. Grant Tinker

They did all the upscale humor. So we didn't miss Diane in that way. We missed her. I mean, Shelley, without Shelley Long, that show doesn't get to year two. Chris D'Ali Yeah. I mean, casting. And this is something else I want to talk about.

People don't often realize how difficult casting is. You have to catch lightning in a bottle. And first of all, finding Kelsey Grammer to play Frazier Crane. But then later on, when you find David Hyde Pierce to play his brother, when you guys, when, you know, when you're casting director finds this person, the casting is just insanely good. And, and you can't imagine, there was no one else who could have played Kelsey Grammer's brother other than David Hyde Pierce.

Grant Tinker It was just perfect. Chris D'Ali Kelsey Oates is a career. And I've told him this to John Lithgow. Because when, when the boys wrote Frazier Crane, they went to Lithgow, who would have been great, you know, and John didn't want to do a series then. And so we looked at a lot of people and then Kelsey's face appeared on a, a tape from New

York City. We all started laughing. He was 28 years old then. And we brought him out and I think he lived in his car for a little bit until, you know, he got going. But he was amazing. He was a fore, he was a foreshow arc to get Diane back in the bar. But once that first show happened, we knew we had to keep him.

I didn't create Frazier, Frazier was created by Angel Casey and Lee, who came to us and said they wanted to spin Frazier off. And their genius was they took an actor, Kelsey Grammer, and made him Sam Malone and made David Hyde Pierce Frazier. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. That's how good an actor Kelsey is that he can go from kind of a strange dude on Cheers

to the center of a show. And they could bring David into play Frazier. So. Who's more Frazier than Frazier. I had heard this, but I loved reading when you guys are putting Cheers together, John Ratsenberger came in and read for the part of Norm didn't have a great audition. And he's walking out thinking and you guys are thinking, well, we won't ever see him again.

And he turns around and says, do you have a blowhard in the bar? We said no. Yeah. So. And he explained, right? Yeah. He just went into the whole thing. And we said, wow.

So we hired Ratsenberger for the pilot. He's in the pilot because he talks about the sweatiest movie I've ever made, that whole repartee. Yeah. Yeah. Which was, which when we were in the office talking about the show, we heard somebody at the Paramount Commissary talking to his friend about what's the sweatiest movie I've ever made.

So we stole that. And because we had done a lot of research in bars about bar conversation, everything like that. So Rats did that. So Rats was hired for the pilot. He was not hired for the second show, but we realized that we missed him. So he's the only permanent member of the cast that's missing one show. He only did 274 out of 275.

But amazing that he, in the audition, I mean, anyone listening right now is going to think that's what I have to do is turn to them and say, do you have a goalkeeper in your show, what, do you have a lion tamer, but he knew a brilliant idea and just such a great tool for the writers, a know-it-all, a guy who knows everything or thinks he knows everything is just a gift to the writing room. And to give him credibility, the great trick that we did was Sam would listen to him and Coach would listen to him, Coach with wide eyes, Nicky would listen to him and give him credibility.

Right. So actually, Teddy, if Teddy listened to you with Sam, the bartender, then you had credibility. So that's, you know, that was the great thing about that show. I couldn't believe this because this will get people's attention if you want to mark how things have changed. The final episode of Cheers watched by 84.4 million people. Oh my God. Now I heard anecdotally the other day someone was talking about a network show, one of those

kind of reality game show type shows. I don't remember which one that it got picked up for another season and it got a.5 in the demo and got picked up. That's the world we're in now. Yes, it is. That if you can get nine people watching a television show, you are, you know, everyone's wants to hand you a cigar and pop the champagne. It must seem otherworldly to you.

David Zaslav, who's running Discovery now said there's 580 shows on the air now. You know, and there's what, I don't know how many networks, 100, maybe 150. I always say when I started out, there were three networks and 30 great comedy writers. Now there are 150 networks and 30 great comedy writers. Yeah. You know? Yeah. That goes to this image I've had for a long time is what changed is the technology.

This delivery system changed so that suddenly instead of there being three networks, not suddenly but very quickly and especially with streaming, there was the capability because of the delivery system and the economics. That's what changed and suddenly there could be 600 shows. But why would you suddenly expect humankind to suddenly get 500 times more talented? It's not, and I always think of it as people wondering, I don't understand technology just enabled us to widen the bathtub by 50 feet. What happened to the water level?

This is what it is. Now I'm, I think there's so much, there's a lot of really brilliant stuff out there, but it's still hard to find because the volume is insane. The volume of just noise and there's just, I never, I always cast a drift. If I don't know specifically what show I'm looking for, you can't scroll. I used to just scroll through television back in the day and you could find something that caught you. There's no way you would scroll now.

It's like saying, I'm just going to wander the Mohave Desert and see what happens. Because the shows that are hits, like Ozark and it has 5 million bytes on Netflix or it's just, those are rare and probably, if you cull it all down, it's probably the same as when there were three networks, you know, all the good shows because that's where all the shows went. All the good shows went on those three networks. So it's just now so diverse that you can find a specific show for your idiosyncrasy and watch it and maybe four other people are watching it.

When I first got started back in 1985, there was always this kind of sense out there that the place people really wanted to get to was movies because that somehow more prestigious and that would be something that you'd hear sometime is have you ever thought of writing a movie or get into the movies and I always thought there's nothing better for a writer than television. As you know, you can do such good work in television because of the way it's structured. Writers have a lot more power in television than they do in movies. In movies, they're completely rewritten.

But the very bottom of the totem pole in movies and have always been treated with a kind of disdain and let's just get another writer in here and let's completely redo it. But writers are at the center of television. One thing I really love about your book is you just reprint pages of great dialogue from all these shows and I'm reading them. It's like you say, it's just great radio writing. The rhythm is all there. It's terrific solid writing that is as good today as it was when it was first done and

it's all was brilliantly realized whereas if it were a movie, I think chances are a lot of that could have been rewritten, tossed out, cut out. The dialogue in the book is from the shows, from some of the shows I've done, but that's tried and true because those sequences got huge laughs and when we're doing a show, if you write a joke and it doesn't get a laugh, you go back and rewrite the joke. You don't rely on the writers. You rely on 200, 300 people behind you. In movies, you're relying on the director and the writer and it may not appeal to an

audience but those, that dialogue in there got huge, huge laughs, especially Will and Grace which is just probably the fun of your show I ever did. Really you think Will and Grace, I love that show but thinking of all of them, you think that was, was it the writing or the writing plus the cast? It's the cast, it's outrageous. So first really, other than Third Rock from the Sun which I did, the pilot of, it's the most outrageous show I ever did. I like to say it's a fairy tale, figuratively and literally.

It's a show with four girls and it's just the jokes are so hard and so strong, especially Karen's jokes and Jack's jokes and it's, you know, Cheers is my favorite and will always be my favorite because it's part of birthing that show but Will and Grace laughs per page is the funniest show because Cheers was, we were about four minutes longer than Will and Grace. We were about 26 minutes, Will and Grace was 21 and a half minutes so you could go a couple of pages without a joke on Cheers which we did. And a lot of Sam and Diane scenes are very riveting and, you know, tension filled but

there's always, you know, after a page or two pages, there's a joke that undercuts it all and makes it, you know, it relieves you from the dramatic moment but on Will and Grace you couldn't do that. You didn't have enough time so it's just joke after joke and just the funniest show, you know, per joke from the… Oh, the compression, the comedy compression is there and that show had such a fascinating arc because it ran, had a great run, big hit, beloved, it leaves and then it comes back and reveres later and I was hard pressed to think of another show that did that.

The Connors. Yeah. The Connors. That's right. That's right. And their show is just as good. Evil Without Roseanne. It's amazing.

Because they have that, it's one of my favorite shows because they have that style. They underplay everything. Everything is like this. You know, Goodman is like this and Laurie's like this, you know, every, there's not effort but there's this rhythm in that show, you know, they don't hit you over the head with the jokes. It's just, wow, that rebooted, you know, and then they did Fuller House and, you know, stuff like that.

But, you know, and when we did the second version of Will and Grace we tried to deal with, because it was 10 years later we tried to deal with the fact that they were older and they were wearing glasses and their problems were different than they were in the first incarnation. You know, the first incarnation was, you know, it helped start a movement. You know, when we ended after, I think it was eight years, the first run, everybody was fine with the gaze, you know, so we were not novel anymore. So we tried to come back with a different bent on it to how, you know, these people

of age and what they're dealing with and are they as lonely as they seemed in the first episode and everything like that. There was a great joke, I think, where they opened the refrigerator. Was it Will who opens there? Yeah, Sean. Yeah, Sean opens the refrigerator. I forget, what is he saying? It was, it was not in the show, but it was in, the show got rebooted because we did a

video for Hillary Clinton. Got it. And yeah, Jack came in, opened the refrigerator, he said, everything in here looks 10 years old. But you could tell probably just, you guys came together to make this short for Hillary Clinton's campaign. And that's what inspired the reboot. Yeah, Bob Greenblatt was there and loved it.

On a personal note, you mentioned James L. Brooks, who you referenced as one of the great, maybe the greatest TV comedy writer of all time. And I would, I would second that motion. I worked with him on The Simpsons. And one of the things that struck me is when you came up with an idea for an episode, there was a day of the year where you would go in and you would pitch it to Jim Brooks. And so I went in and I was pitching him this idea and he liked it and he started to laugh. Oh.

Oh. Yes. Yes. Some kind of a seabird. Oh. Oh. Oh. And I heard the laugh and a electric jolt went up my spine and I said, I know that laugh

because if you listen to an old Mary Tyler Moore episode, you can hear him laughing. And he laughs not when the audience is laughing. No. He laughs at attitudes. Yeah. When there's a funny, on taxi, when Danny would, you know, sizing somebody up before he set a line, you would hear Jim start laughing, you know, that strange laugh that he has. And so I knew, it was just so odd, I hadn't put two and two together and then I realized

I've subliminally heard this laugh sitting on the heat vent in 1974 in Brookline, Massachusetts. And now I'm pitching to this guy and he's laughing and it's, it all came together. Yeah. It's very eerie. Were you ever in the room with him when he was, when he would pitch? Oh yeah. Oh my God. Some of the stuff, I'll never forget the, because when I was doing taxi, I would come

into the rewrite room and I would stay till 10 o'clock because I had to get up in the morning with the actors and block the next day. But I would be in the rewrite room just to hear and to know what the writers wanted. So I was more educated when the actors came in. And we were doing a scene where a box arrives from his old country with a liquor called Brefnish. And so this was the idea that, and Jim pitched the scene where all the cabbies line up to try Brefnish and judge the first one.

And he tries it and he falls on the floor and Reverend Jim says, the line forms behind me. Out of the top of his head, I mean it was, you know, it was amazing, he was amazing that one. And that has to be invested in the characters. You know, you have to give them something underneath that grounds the characters. And you know, with Cheers, we made Salmon ex-alcoholic because that gave him, although he's, you know, he's a stud and wants to go to bed with every woman.

He's still underneath. There's a kind of sadness to him. And he blew his career. Yeah. So that's important. That's what grounds him. You know, where audiences identify with them, you know, with every character, Louis de Palma, you identify with him by his lot in life, by how he looks.

You know he's angry, but you attribute it to, well, the hand he was dealt, the same with Carla. You know, with Diane, even with Diane, you still, you know, she wanted to be a professor, but she was never going to be a professor. She was going to be a waitress. And so that's what, you know, cause people, real people identify with that. You know, it's interesting cause in the book you point out, and I hadn't thought about this either, which is that in, and I thought it was fascinating that in your guy's opinion,

all of these characters have these flaws, have these inner conflicts, they're constantly being broken, they're constantly being put back together again, except for one, Norm. And you say, Norm is just the one truly centered, happy character who sits, who kind of anchors the whole thing. And I thought, oh yeah, I see that now, that I hadn't thought of it quite that way. Yeah, he's, well, you know, he's happy just sitting on a bar stool, you know, having, saying one more for the road and never leaving. In fact, the only time, the only time we addressed designated driving was in the pilot episode

when coach drives Norm home cause he's been there too long, but we never did it again. Norm is, Norm is a character that everybody knows. I had a Norm at the Allstate Bar in New York City. It was a guy who sat at the end of the bar and just says, and literally said, one more and I'm out of here. And you know, at the end of the evening, he was still there. Everybody knows Norm. There's great, some of the dialogue that you reprint in here is, I said so great, but

just, I was reading through all these Norm lines and they are so, so fantastic and there's one where he's, I think Sam's closing up and Norm just says, wow, 17 and a half hours just flew by. But there's so many great pages of Norm lines in here that are, that are fantastic. It saves me writing. So. Hey, I noticed that. Yeah.

But. The writer's guild wants to talk to you, by the way. The evolution of the Normism, I talk about in the book, the evolution of the Normism is that in the pilot, in front of the pilot audience, when Norm entered and says, afternoon everybody and everybody says, Norm, because that was from Nicky Colosanto at a bar. He was from Rhode Island and Providence, he had a bar where everybody screamed his name when he walked in. Right.

And Sam said, what do you know when Norm says not enough? And that was not written as a joke. That was not written as a joke. And when the audience roared at that line, I looked at Glenn and I looked at Glenn Charles and I said, you know, and I looked at him with the look of saying, oh my God, they're laughing at a character. Yeah. Yeah.

This roly-poly guy saying, not enough. You know, if you had another guy coming in doing it, it would not have been the same as George doing it. And so it became incumbent upon us every time he entered to do, you know, to do a joke. And there was so many of them like, Sam pour me a beer, it's 9 a.m., float a cornflake in it. Oh, there was this scene that I always remembered and I was so glad you reprinted it in here where a little boy comes into the bar.

That's in the pilot. It's in the pilot. That's a teaser. And God, the boy comes in, how about a beer chief? And Sam says, how about an ID? And the kid says, an ID? That's very flattering. Where do I tell the misses?

And Sam looks at the ID and he goes, ah, military ID, first sergeant, Walter Keller, born 1944. That makes you 38. Must have fought in Vietnam. Boy says, oh yeah. Sam says, what was it like? Boy, gross. Sam, yeah. That's what they say.

War is gross. And then he says, I'm sorry soldier. And the boy goes, this is the thanks we get. I mean, that's the best, that's just the best TV writing imaginable. That's how the pilot opens. Yeah. That's just so great. I mean, it was originally later on in the show, but we moved it up and we could do a

tag or a teaser. So a teaser is before the show, tags at the end of the show. So we moved it up to be the teaser and it was John Naven was the kid's name, I'll never forget it. And Teddy was so great in that scene because he wasn't mean. He was sweet with the kid, tolerant and it just set that character. He's yes anding the whole time. He's saying, okay, well, let's take a look.

Very good. First sergeant. All right. One thing I wanted to touch on that really speaks to how much things have changed is you see Cheers Now and it's replayed all over the world constantly. And what I always appreciate is it has a theme song and only does it have a theme song. It has one of the best theme songs ever, but it is no quick affair. You know, it is a real theme song.

I think it charted too. I think it was up at the top of the charts. That song. Yeah, it was. Everybody knows your name. It was going to the top except Billy Jean came out in 1982 and I couldn't moonwalk. But I was thinking about it, I was thinking about so much of my childhood affection revolves around these theme songs, you know, the Get Smart theme song, Hawaii 5.0, F Troop, you

know, I mean, that's what an amazing, but just that would tell a story and an amazing music in these orchestras, Wild Wild West, just incredible theme songs. When you think about today, they're gone because you can't spend the time. A show has to start immediately. You can barely show the title of the show. And that's about it. Yeah, because if you have a theme song, it takes away from content and you can't do it anymore.

Again, Cheers had, we had 26 minutes to tell a tale, now you only have 21 and a half minutes. So there's no time for a theme song. You know, the theme song is, that tells the whole story of that show. That was written by Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart Angelo. Judy is the wife, or is the widow of John Angelo is my close friend, who was an investment banker and called me and said, his wife is done raising kids. She wants to go back to music writing. Can she send you a song for your show?

And so that was the song they sent. And you guys knew right away when you heard that song. Oh my God. Yeah. Oh my God. And if you Google it, the lyrics that were originally written are really funny lyrics. But we couldn't do it. You can't do a funny lyrics every week, you know, so that we made them more generic.

But it's a wonderful song that encapsulates that show perfectly. So people for years now have been saying, well, the sitcom is dead. I know that they've said that repeatedly off and on for 40 years. You're not buying it. Me? Yeah. You don't buy that it's over for the traditional sitcom. Well, I've dressed in a dark suit about four times for the death of sitcom.

And every time I've gotten to the funeral, they've closed the casket. So I'm a little concerned now. This is the first time. And I don't know why studios aren't doing it anymore or networks aren't doing it anymore. Even streamers are not doing it anymore. It's economical. It's funny. The audiences love it.

They watch all these shows and reruns. So I don't know, I have no reason why it is declining so much. I've listened to people try to explain it. I can't explain it, but selfishly I was there for a golden age of television when it was King. So I'm sad now that there are very few. There's like The Neighborhood, Cedric the Entertainer Show, and Chuck Lorre has Bob Hart's Abashella.

But I don't know any other sitcom. I had this thought a couple of years ago, maybe more than a couple of years ago, but it was around the time that people were wondering, well, what's going on with the multi-camera sitcom in front of a live audience? And I started to wonder if there's a generation, I'm thinking about my kids, that have come of age watching single camera. And maybe this comes from reality television, that it's inculcated in them, that that's the real world.

Maybe, but Friends is still the most popular show, and that's in front of a live audience. So I'm not sure why. I'm not sure, you know, you need one great sitcom, but I haven't seen it come down the pie kit. That's amazing. I know that you worked, you very much regretted that you didn't get to direct. You wanted to be the guy that directed most of the Friends episodes, but you weren't able to commit to that early on in the show.

You did the pilot, and you did a number of those shows. I did 15 of them. You did 15 of them. Did you know right away when they got that group together that? On all the sitcoms I do, on all the pilots I do, I have a test audience. Three days before we shoot the show, I have a single camera, and that helps me if there's a set that the whole audience can't see. The camera will go down there and just shoot a master so the audience can see it.

And on that show, it was through the roof. That single camera audience, they loved those characters. They loved them. You know, I did the first, I think three or four, and you know, there's a story about me taking the cast to Vegas because I knew there was something special about the show. So you know, that happened on Will and Grace, that happened on Cheers. The only show that happened on that wasn't a success was a show called The Class, which was written by David Crane and Jeffrey Clarrick.

David Crane was one of the writers on Friends, one of the geniuses on Friends. And that had a great audience, but it never made it. But you can sense in doing the shows whether the audience reacts to it. And I knew then and there how good that show was. And you know, you talked about casting before and how lucky you are. I did, that show was done in 94 and I had agreed to do four pilots already and they sent me, Martin and David sent me that script and I said to my agent, wow, I have to do this show.

In fact, 95% of the script that was sent to me ended up on the air. So I said, I have to do it. So it was the last pilot I did in 1994 and those six people were available. So that'll tell you how lucky you have to be. You know, Jen had another show that we were in second position. She was doing a show called Modeling Through on CBS, which somehow they got her out of and Matt Perry had done another pilot and that pilot didn't go, but those six people. And you think about if something had been just a little different, that chemistry wouldn't

have been there and these are now iconic TV characters, but you're right. People don't realize how much of, I mean, I think this occasionally when you find out that Humphrey Bogart was like the ninth choice to be in Casablanca and he was not thought of as he was not a leading man, but you know, that's how it worked. He was available and a bunch of the other people they wanted were not available. And so that's how we get Humphrey Bogart as Rick in Casablanca and it's the same thing with these television shows. It's a million things have to go wrong for it to go right.

Yeah, it was amazing that, you know, it's so often, you know, people, how did you find they think they think of them now as stars and how did you get them to agree to do friends? But they weren't, they were, you know, Lisa was Lisa was on the cheers. She was on a cheer. She played an actor in Woody in Woody Harrelson was in a community theater and she was the actress with Woody. And so, you know, it's just, you know, they were unknown. He knew these people and all of a sudden bang, that's, that's the kind of show I like.

I like a show where you bring a cast of people nobody's ever seen before, right? You know, because then the audience feels like they've created a hit by liking these people and they've created stars. So that's because you bring these people, you've never seen them before. So you have this sense of surprise when you cut to these six on cheers, you cut to the people on, on friends, yeah, I'm sorry, you cut six on friends and you cut to the people on cheers or taxi, you, you have no history with them. Right.

Will and Grace. I didn't know those performers. Yeah. No. So they open their mouths and oh my God. I also think there's something when the people watching it have, it's the people that made them stars. Right.

They weren't brought in as stars. Right. So, you know, we're saying, no, those people are stars. I like these guys, them, they're it. And that's, that's much more magical than this person's been around in show business for 30 years as a legend and now we're going to give them their own show. Right. Right.

So that's, that's almost all the shows I've, I've ever done have, I tend not to want to work if, if you've got a star in the show, it just, you know, because you have to serve the star and, you know, it's just, it throws off stuff for me. I like the, the unknowns and, and having an audience discover the unknown. Well, this has been a huge, as I said, I said at the beginning, looking forward to this, this is a treat for me, a huge treat because I love your work. I love television. You're so smart about comedy and I do recommend people, this book is fantastic and you can

read this book if you're, if you're in theater, read this book. If you're interested in television, read this book. If you're interested in comedy writing, read this book. Comedy performing, read this book. It's just, and read it a different time for each reason. Buy a different copy. Yeah. Buy different copies.

Yeah. No, it really is. And on a personal note, I'll tell you when I got started with my late night show and was going through a really difficult period and getting written off all the time and constantly reading that I was going to be canceled, I ended up, I'd say about a year or two into the show, it was very early on and I ran into you someplace and you were very encouraging to me and said some nice things to me and it meant the world to me. I appreciate it.

It was a huge deal and I remember thinking, well, if James Burroughs thinks I'm doing okay job, then I think that I'm just going to live off that for about a year or 30. So thank you so much for coming on the show and thank you for, I mean, I think you have provided me with maybe 85,000 laughs in my life. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Yeah.

This was great. Thank you. Thank you. I'm coming in hot and loaded for bear. Oh. Yeah. Oh, okay. Which is, I have something I want to talk about.

I'm trying to reveal my true personality on this podcast and I think it's come out over the time I occasionally make jokes and people probably think, well, that's not real. Conan's exaggerating that for comedic effectors being self-deprecating. But I think over the years, whether on TV or here on the podcast, I've talked about how I have no body awareness. I'm not in touch with my body, very New England, Catholic, Irish, you've noticed that over the years, right? What do you mean you're not in touch?

Like you don't know how big you, like how big you are? What? Or you're just not in touch with it like you don't touch yourself. Okay. Okay. This got derailed instantly. I'm sorry. What I'm saying is.

Figure out what you meant that you're not in touch with your body. Yeah, I'm not clear either. Okay. I make jokes over the years about how I don't, I'm not someone that's nude a lot. Do you know what I mean? I'm not one of those people. Oh, I get it. Okay.

I don't have a lot of body consciousness. Right. Was that not clear? No, I get it. You've made it clear. Okay. But I do, I touch myself constantly. Okay.

Oh, God. But I'm blindfolded. I'm constantly using my hands to try and find out what's going on down there. But I do it with my eyes closed and blindfolded. But anyway, my point is that I say that and I think people probably take it with a grain of salt. Meaning, oh, he's just, he's playing up that role. Sure.

I had an experience recently that drove home for me just how out of touch I am with my own body, which is I, I've been running a lot in the last year. I started doing it during COVID, running a lot, running a lot, running a lot. And then my left foot really started to hurt. And I went in to get it checked out and they said, you have very common planters, fasciitis, you know, your arch, the tissue there is really activated. And it's, I'm here that's quite common with runners. This doctor recommended, she said, go see this woman.

I won't say her name. I want to respect her privacy. She's great. She's, this woman is great. She specializes in feet and working on feet. So I went to see this woman and she's terrific. She's originally from Scotland. She's got this amazing Scottish accent and she's really funny and a great storyteller

of social. She'll be there and she'll, you know, work on my feet and try and fix my arch on my left foot while she's spinning these great tails. And I, she's, she's fantastic. But the first day I went, she said, all right, let's take a look and don't do a Scottish accent. But she's like, you know, ah, you know, let's see her foot. And so, Groundskeeper Willie, yeah, she's sort of a grant.

She sounds like track or Groundskeeper Willie. And so I take off my shoe and she's like, oh, let's be seeing what you're having here. Oh, okay. 100% from Ireland. Yeah. Just never set foot in Scotland. When I said she's Scott, she enjoys Scotch, but she's, she's Irish. No.

Yeah, she takes, I take off my, my, my shoe. She's looking at my foot and she goes, oh man, look at your foot. And I looked down at my foot and I realized I have never spent any time in my life looking at my own foot. Oh, never, ever, ever. And I'm, here's, I'm not exaggerating. So I had, I took off both shoes and I'm looking down at my feet and she was commenting on how they're not that malleable, they're like me, they're kind of uptight and they need

to be stretched and my, she said, your toes are all crammed together, there's no space between them. And I'm seeing it all for the first time and this is a part of my body. She might as well have been showing me like a quartz crystal that she found in a mountain. Like I was just like, wow, look at that. It's my fucking feet without any socks on them. And I'm looking at them as if it's a new mystery and then she goes, and I'm not looking at my foot at this point.

She goes, oh, and you've got a webbed, webbed toes on two of my toes are attached with webbing. And I said, which foot? Because I knew, but I didn't know which foot. What? And she was like, what? She was like, you left foot and I looked and sure enough, like my, I think it's my third and fourth toes of like a webbing that goes up high. There's, my toes are super long.

What? My brother has that. Yeah. And she goes, oh, and she says like, that's a, you know, what it used to think that was a sign of royalty or something, some bullshit someone made up who was stuck with a webbed toe. I should mention my brother is awkward. Yeah.

Yeah. Your brother awkwardness. So anyway, I didn't immediately know, I was like looking up at the ceiling when she said, you've got a webbed toe and I know that kind of, but I couldn't tell you which foot. Now you'd think, am I wrong? That feels. That's weird. I screwed up.

That is really weird. What are you clipping your toenails? You're not ever like. Who clips their toenails? Would you? That's the second thing. That's the second thing she said was she, she was like, Christ. I can't do it.

Captain. Yes. It's like Freddy Krueger down here. You look like Freddy Krueger down here because I've let them grow like Howard Hughes. They've been growing since 1963. Oh. We let Wolverine down here. Oh, you got Wolverine down here.

You're fucking. Wow. No, no, no, no, no, I do, but I don't really, I'm not, what I'm saying is why I'm not, I'm just not in touch with my own body. And I realized that the, my least favorite question is if I go to a doctor, I'm seeing anyone about a sore back or anything and they tell you, okay, how does this feel? Now how does this feel? I don't like it.

Cause I say, I don't know. I don't know how things feel. Oh my God. What do you mean? How do things feel? Why are you like this? I, well, I think she could get an answer from parents. Oh.

But I don't think there's, I think, you know, I think you need to go home, take off every stitch of clothing, stand in front of a full length mirror and get to know Konesy. Can you do that? Can you literally, can you, can you actually do that? No, because I'm telling you, and I'm not even kidding. If I stood naked in front of a full length mirror to get to know my own body, I would be doing bits within a second. Yeah.

I would be doing bits and takes. I would not, I would not be able to be real. I would, I would, I'm telling you, and this is me being completely honest, but who doesn't know at my age exactly which two toes are where. That's crazy. Yeah, that is a little strange. That's weird. Like if you had a birthmark on your back, you, would you be able to know at least that?

Like is, I mean, is there- Well, I wouldn't, would I be able to see her or whatever? I mean, like, you know, would you have known that? Yeah. How would a lover have to tell me? Oh. You know you have a 666 on your scalp, right? Oh, Jesus, I'm quite aware of that.

Okay. Because he comes by every now and then says, remember the contract, a talk show from total obscurity. What's your request? And I came through on it, then you come back and what a successful podcast, and I agreed to that, but you will pay in the next life. Anyway, that's Lauren Michaels, by the way. You have blown away that you don't know your own feet.

I didn't know my own feet and now she said in this, this, this person who works on feet, this, this, this Scottish woman, who's fantastic. She said a lot of people don't know their feet because we just, she said, no one cares about their feet until their feet hurt. And resignation. Oh, I thought you were resigning and it just said wrap question mark. But they would still know which toes are, are webbed. That's, you don't have to spend a lot of time looking at your feet.

I know, but this is one of those things is that I don't think I have any awareness about my body and I don't like it when people want me to describe where's the pain or how does the pain feel because I think, I don't, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what feels better this or that. They're just trying to help you. I know, but I, it's my least, I've told my wife that I said my least favorite question is how does this feel?

I mean, I don't know how things feel. Let's just get through this and get to the grave. There's so much to unpack. Do you, when you're sleeping, don't you ever kind of wiggle your toes and then you know that two are moving with each other on one foot? No, there's, there's, no, first of all, you can't feel, there's nothing, the webbed toes don't feel any different. You can feel one pulling the other.

No, they don't articulate. My toes don't really even articulate. You just have no jointed toes? No, they, they, they should articulate. I have all the equipment down there. Trust me, I'm going all the equipment out again. No, no, no. That's not a sexual thing.

I just mean my, I was talking in a sexual way about my toes, but, but what I'm saying is that I don't know, I couldn't like grasp something with my toes. Do you know what I mean? Can you do that? Can you grasp something with your toes? I can ape, but yeah, I could, I could pick somewhat ape-like. I guess. You're a very intelligent, fussy ape.

I can pick up a TV remote control with my feet. I mean, I don't, I'm not, I'm not. You can type with your feet and play the piano with your feet, but you're not like an ape. You do beautiful scrimshaw with your feet. You make origami with your feet, but you're not an ape. Well, I'll take that over this guy that doesn't even know he has feet. Yeah. I don't know I have feet.

Are you comfortable with your body? Like if you went to a nude beach and everybody was getting naked, you'd be like, let's do this guys. Of course I'm not. But you, you were in a bit once with Chelsea Handler where you were like, not naked, but you had a, you know, a nude. But I don't, that's not my preference. That's when you do a bit with Chelsea Handler, it's understood you must be naked, but, and

I will do anything for comedy, but it's not my preference to be naked. It's not my natural state, even though it is my natural state. I love it. And when we go to the Korean spa, I'm like, let's do this. My mother said I was born in a little three-piece suit. Oh. Yes. Yeah.

Well, maybe this is too personal, but what do you sleep in? Oh, I sleep in boxer briefs and a T-shirt. Okay. And then long socks and a Nixon mask. And when I wake up, I go, it's going to be a great day. Conan O'Brien needs a friend with Conan O'Brien, Sonam of Sessian and Matt Gorely, produced by me, Matt Gorely, executive produced by Adam Sacks, Joanna Solotarov and Jeff Ross at Team Coco and Colin Anderson and Cody Fisher at Year Wolf, theme song by the White Stripes,

incidental music by Jimmy Vivino. Take it away, Jimmy. Our supervising producer is Aaron Blair and our associate talent producer is Jennifer Apples, engineering by Will Beckton, additional production support by Mars Melnick, talent booking by Paula Davis, Gina Batista and Britt Kahn. You can rate and review this show on Apple Podcasts and you might find your review read on a future episode. Got a question for Conan?

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