Fresh Air - Remembering master of the TV sitcom, James Burrows

Episode Date: June 26, 2026

We remember one of the most sought-after directors in television, James Burrows. He died June 19 at age 85. Burrows worked on many classic sitcoms including ‘Taxi,’ ‘Frasier,’ ‘Friends,’ ���Will and Grace’ and ‘Cheers.' He was known for his comedic instincts, his visual style, and for insisting the comedy be believable. Burrows spoke with Terry Gross in 2006. Also, we hear an appreciation from TV critic and historian David Bianculli. Film critic Justin Chang reviews ‘The Invite,’ starring Seth Rogen and Olivia Wilde. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Today we remember James Burroughs, one of the most respected and sought-after directors of TV comedies. In over five decades, he directed more than a thousand episodes, episodes of taxi, cheers, friends, Frazier, Will & Grace, and many other sitcoms. Burroughs died June 19th at the age of 85. A statement by the Director's Guild of America described him as an incredibly generous colleague, sharing his wisdom. wisdom, and warm humor with all he worked with. In a statement, his family said, Burroughs understood that great comedy was never simply about laughter. It was about humanity, connection, and truth. We're going to listen to Terry's 2006 interview with James Burroughs in a few minutes, but first we have this appreciation by our TV critic, David B. and Cooley. James Burroughs was born in L.A. in 1940, but didn't live there long. His family moved to New York

when he was five. His father, Abe Burroughs, had written for radio and television, but found his biggest success on Broadway, as a director and especially as a writer. Abe Burroughs wrote the books for the musicals, Guys and Dolls, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and Can Can. His son James became a director, too, but went back to Los Angeles to do so. His big break was directing an episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, after which James Burroughs landed Jobs' job. directing multiple episodes of many popular sitcoms of the 1970s, including the Bob Newhart show, the Tony Randall Show, Laverne and Shirley, and Taxi. By the time he co-created Cheers with Glenn and Les Charles in 1982, James Burroughs was considered the best sitcom director in the business,

a title he maintained for decades. The reasons were obvious. James Burroughs made one of the most significant improvements to the sitcom genre, since I Love Lucy popularized the three-camera format of shooting before a studio audience. Burroughs added a fourth camera, which allowed him to capture more close-ups and frame the action as naturally as he could. Burroughs was a master at setting the tone for a new series, working with young actors to shape their characters and find just the right comic flow. Over his career, he won 11 Emmy Awards and directed a staggering number of TV pilots, specifically 75. But it isn't just the quantity of premiere episodes directed by James Burroughs that's so amazing. It's the quality.

He directed the introductory episodes of Taxi, Cheers, and Frazier. Not just the original 1993 Frazier, but the 2023 remake as well 30 years later. He also directed the first episodes of the Big Bang Theory, Nightcourt, Wings, News Radio, Third Rock from the Sun, Dharma and Greg, two and a half men, friends, and Will and Grace. And sometimes James Burroughs stuck around for quite a while, for more than 200 episodes of both Will and Grace and Cheers, and 75 episodes of Taxi. For me, the absolute best example of Jim Burroughs' gifts as a TV director came in a 1979 episode of Taxi, written by Glenn and Les Charles. It was an episode written to showcase Christopher Lloyd, who had guest starred in a previous episode as Reverend Jim, a hippie preacher from the 60s who was laid back, confused, and dealing with a long history of recreational drug use.

At the time, Reverend Jim was an outrageous character to introduce to a primetime TV show. But Taxi already had triumphed by mixing types of comic styles that shouldn't have worked. Judd Hirsch, Tony Danza, Mary Lou Henner, Andy Kaufman, Jeff Conaway, Danny DeVito, all were part of the Brooklyn Cab outfit that was eager for Reverend Jim to join its ranks. But to do that, he'd have to go to the DMV and pass a driver's exam. not just behind the wheel, but on paper. It's in that DMV office where Burroughs helped shape what I consider the funniest scene in TV history. He allows the comedy to build at its own pace and encourages the young Christopher Lloyd to steal the show as Reverend Jim.

And most important of all, James Burroughs places his cameras and frames the action to catch it all, not only intense close-ups of an increasingly frustrated Reverend Jim, but group shots, capturing the reactions of Jeff Conaway's Bobby, Mary Lou Henners-Alene, and everyone else trying to help him take the test. Bobby tries to speed things up by reading the application to Reverend Jim as Elaine stands nearby. Here, let me help you out, okay? Have you ever experienced loss of consciousness, hallucinations, dizzy spells, convulsive disorders, fainting or periods of loss of memory?

As in everyone? But no. Mental illness or narcotic addiction. That's a tough choice. Okay, that's it. You ready for the test? I thought this was it. Oh, man.

It's getting rough for a row. Eventually, Reverend Jim gets a copy of the test, slumps in his classroom-style desk, and gets stuck on the first question. His cabbie friends are standing on the other side of the room, but he asks for help anyway, louder and more angrily every time. Christopher Lloyd is brilliant, and Burroughs lets the scene build and flow. And listen to the studio audience. They're not just laughing.

They're howling. What does a yellow-white mean? Slow down. Okay. What? Like me. Slow down. Okay.

Well, yell. Yeah. I'm guessing you had your own favorite memories and favorite laughs from a sitcom directed by James Burroughs. From friends, from cheers, from Frasier, from Big Bang Theory, or from so many others. And that's the point, really. The legacy of James Burroughs, no matter where you look, is bound to make you smile. David B. and Cooley is our TV critic.

Terry Groh spoke to James Burroughs in 2006. He got his start in television directing episodes of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, the Bob Newhart Show, and Laverne and Shirley. But before that, he worked on some of his father's musicals. His father Abe Burroughs wrote the books for the musicals, Guys and Dolls, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and Cactus Flower. I was an assistant stage manager or an assistant to the assistant on an ill-fated musical called Breakfast at Tiffany's, where I met Mary Tilemore and Richard Chamberlain with a stars.

And I went on subsequently to stage manager for my father on cactus flower, the production on the road, and then in New York City in 40 carrots. So I got to see my father who really, really, wrote on his feet because he would write a scene and then when he would get in rehearsal he would change the scene just on his feet and you began to see how fascinating he was and that's when I you know I kind of have his style of directing I'm a listener I'm not necessarily a watcher and Abe would always he would say to me when he went to a run through of one of his shows or went to see one of his shows in in the theater he would always walk behind the set

uh he wouldn't watch because he he wanted to know that there was always noise happening on stage. He listened for the noise. He knew if there was no noise that he was in trouble. So I do that when I direct my show. So that, you know, that is the essence of the experience with my father. In subsequent years, a lot of his gift and a lot of his skills seem to come out of me at the strangest times. It's not like I learned them as much as, you know, They were like osmosis. I absorbed them and they kind of seep out of my skin in certain situations. So when you're directing a TV show, you're sometimes backstage and not looking at the action or at the monitor?

Well, I never look at the monitor because it's about the shows I do are in front of a light audience. So it's about the play. It's about what's happening there. I've been doing it long enough to know that I don't have to worry about the camera shots because I know they'll all be there. So I listen and watch, you know, I'll walk behind the cameras, not watching the action necessarily. But a lot, you know, most of the time I watch the play because, and I make my writers watch the play, or they can watch the cut on the screen. But they don't watch the quad split.

A quad split is a television screen that has the four cameras that I used to shoot the show on that. And if they watch the quad split, they're always worried about mics and shots and shots not matching. So I make all the writers watch the play because that's eventually what makes a hit show. So what made you realize that you wanted to switch from the stage to television? In the course of doing cactus flowers and 40 carrots around the country, I would work at a lot of dinner theaters, a lot of regional, not regional theater, dinner theaters, summer stock theaters. I would do these, these not situation comedies, comedies, odd couple, barefoot in the park, even Bly Spirit I did I'm trying to say never too late

all these plays the comedies that have been in Broadway and I do them with stars and I had about eight days to stage the whole thing and I could get it done I was good at that and then one night I was at home after rehearsal and I turned on the television there was a Mary Tyler Moore show

and they were doing 20 minutes a week in front of a live audience and here I was doing 120 minutes a week to get ready for a live audience. And I thought I could do that. I thought I could translate my skills on stage to the skills required to do that television show because it was like filming a theatrical show. So I wrote a letter to Mary Talomore. As I said before, I had the connection because I was a stage manager on her first Broadway show, so she kind of knew me. And Grant Tinker called me and he said,

We're interested in theatrical directors at MTM. Would you come out and do one show? And I don't know what's faster than the New York second, but whatever it was, I said yes. And I was, the rest is history. So you got started directing MTM productions like the Bob Newhart show, Mary Taylor-Lam show, Phyllis. Yes? Yes. Yes.

Now, were you at first like understudying other directors or the let you just go at it? Well, the first thing you have to do is you have to learn the technical stuff. So they brought me out here and you kind of have to observe. Being an observer is you sit in the stands and you watch a week of rehearsals. And the first three days are with actors and writers alone. And the fourth day the cameras come in and the fifth day you shoot the show. And for me, with actors and writers, I kind of got that. It was when the cameras came in that became daunting.

So I watched for maybe two months straight, I watched on a Newhart show. Then I went over to the Ameri-Talemore show, and I watched Jay Sandridge, who to me is the true genius of this medium. I watched him and became very good friends with him. And so I kind of started to get a knowledge of what to do with cameras, how to figure them out. And then they assigned me to a show called Friends and Lovers, which was the Paul Sand show. And I was Paul Sand's dialogue coach. I would help him run lines. But in a time when I wasn't doing that, I would watch cameras.

And eventually they called me and they said, we're going to give you a shot. And I figured it would be on the Paul Sand show. And all of a sudden it was a Mary Tyler Moore show. Do you remember that first show that you did? I do, vividly. How did it go? What sticks out in your mind? Oh, my God. Well, we read the script.

It was a show where Lou Grant moves into Rota's apartment, so he's living above Mary, which means that they work together and they live together, which wasn't good for the relationship. And so we read the script around the table, and it was a D-minus. It was awful. And I said to Grant, I said, in the sea of Danish, I get a bagel. and it was literally it was it was literally

just the show was awful I mean the initial reading they made it better because you would rewrite the writers would rewrite all the time and so I had to go down back in those days you rehearsed immediately

after you read you just went down and started running scenes and so I was dealing with a cast who hated the script too and yet I had to run these scenes and so I would do it and I can't tell you

I invoke Chekhov, I invoke Stringberg, I invoke Kaufman and Hark. I did anything to try to ease it for them, to try to come up with some comic business, anything that would help them get through this process. And so I was working the first three days with the actors and cameras, and I guess we finally got the show in some sort of semblance. And then the cameras came in, and that was daunting enough for me. It was very difficult. I did it on my own.

want any help. And on the fifth day, just before we shot, Mary Tyler Moore came over to me and they said, we feel our investment in you has worked out. And that was even before I shot the show. And I couldn't have been higher figuratively. And we shot the show and it turned out all right. And Jay Sanders was there and helped me a little bit. And the minute that show was over, I got two New Hearts and I got a Bob Crane and a Paul Sand. And next year I was on the filler show, so I was on my way. Was the show as bad after it was shot as it was when you were doing the reading? It was, it's a C-plus show.

It's not a very good show. You know, I, in fact, the script after me won an Emmy. So by the luck of the draw, by the luck of the draw, I got, I didn't get the Emmy show. I got an okay show, and it might have helped me because of the amount of work I had to do and the amount of talking and inspiring I had to do, in hindsight, might have really helped me succeed in there and impress the actors. Okay, so you start off at MTM in television, and then you do taxi, and about how many episodes would you estimate you did of taxi? I think I did 75. And you were there right from the beginning with taxi, right?

I was there. It was after, I kind of left MTM after about three or four years and started to go other places. I went on Laverne and Shirley where I had a ball, although that was a tough show. And then I did a show with Ned Beatty. I was all a hired hand. I didn't do many pilots or anything like that. And then the boys from M.T.M. Ed Weinberger, Jim Brooks, Stan Daniels, and Dave Davis had created a show called Taxi. and they called me to direct it. And probably the most difficult show I ever did because the cast was so divergent,

the writing was so outrageous, the set was so gigantic. And it was my first really big show where I was in charge from the beginning. But it was like getting all these egos in the same room, there wasn't a room big enough. And it was a struggle. and yet I was heard. I got out there and I said what I wanted to say and I was heard. It was tough at times to be heard, but I fought. And the great thing about that show was that the producers of that show and headwriters were Glenn Charles and Les Charles, who I'd first met on Phyllis. And then they were brought in on taxi. So we struck up a friendship. We were both handled by the same agent.

And he thought it would be good for us to do a show together. So I think about the third year of taxi, we started to think about a show. But taxi, if you go back and watch that show, there is some of the funniest television I think I've ever done. The standard out of that show is Reverend Jim, what does the yellow light mean, slow down? And that is, to me, one of the biggest last I had ever done on taxi. And so I have fond memories of that show. it was also a great learning experience. James Burroughs speaking with Terry Gross in 2006.

He died last week at the age of 85. Here's one of the scenes from episode three of Cheers with Ted Danson and Shelley Long, which Burroughs directed. Why are you so upset? You know, this week I have gone out with all the women I know. I mean, all the women I really enjoyed. And all of a sudden, all I can think about is how stupid they are. I mean, my life isn't fun anymore.

It's because of you. Because of me? Yeah. You're a snob. A snob? Yeah, that's right. Well, you're a rapidly aging adolescent. Well, I would rather be that than a snob.

And I would rather be a snob. Well, good, because you are. Sam, do yourself a favor. Go back to your tootsies and you're ready. parts. I'd hate to see the bowling alleys close on my account. Hey, wait a minute, wait a minute. Are you saying that I'm too dumb to date smart women? I'm saying that it would be very difficult for you. A really intelligent woman would see your line of BS a mile away. You think so, huh? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah, well, uh, you know, I've never

met an intelligent woman that I'd want to date. On behalf of the intelligent women around the world. May I just say, whew! Coming up, we'll hear about Burroughs' work on Cheers and Frazier, and later Justin Chang reviews the new film The Invite. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air. Making your way in the world today takes everything you've got. Taking a break from all your worries sure would help a lot.

Wouldn't you lie? This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. We're remembering James Burroughs, who was one of the most respected TV directors in the business. He directed over a thousand episodes of Cheers, Taxi, Friends, Frazier, Will & Grace, and also the Big Bang Theory, Third Rock from the Sun, Mike and Molly, and two broke girls. Burroughs died last week at the age of 85. He spoke with Terry Gross in 2006.

Now, after taxi, you left with a couple of the creators of Taxi, Glenn Charles and Les Charles, and started Cheers. And on Cheers and on Taxi, you had that. a chance to direct characters from the very start and therefore to shape them, to help shape them through your direction as opposed to inheriting characters on an already existing series. Can you talk a little bit about what it's like to actually create a character from scratch, a character that you hope will endure for years in a series? Well, the first thing that has to happen, it has to be on the page.

So I am very careful when I select scripts. And when we talked about, Glenn Less and I talked about doing cheers, we spent, two months talking about these characters. And then the boys went off and wrote the script. And a month later, when I read it, it was, I said to the boys, you have brought radio back to television, which is what they did. They wrote a really smart show that literally could have been a radio show

because there wasn't that much movement. It was all about attitudes and all about intonations and nuances and stuff like that. Can I just stop you? That would be a terrible incident. insult to a lot of people. If you said, there are a lot of TV people, if you said to them, you've just produced this brilliant radio show, we've just written a brilliant radio show, they would think that was a terrible insult because they're working on television. And sometimes

when you say radio to television people, it's like saying you don't know what you're doing. You're blind. You can hear, but you're blind. No. If you watch that show, people cross occasionally. Norm comes into the bar, but you've got to listen to that show. It's all about listening. Absolutely, yeah, yeah. There's no eye. candy in that show. There's no I'll never forget. Originally DeBois in the first draft had some kind of hurdle race in there that we took out.

But it was. They came in, they sat down, they told their stories, and that's what it is. You could have done that show on radio. You wouldn't have to worry about how the actors looked, as long as their voices were good. But it was

a television show. But when I meant brought radio to television, what it was smart. It was a smart show. It was an upscale smart show with jokes about Schopenhauer and Updike and Freud and Jung and we didn't care if the audience knew who those people were. And they, they, there was a genius job and so it was my job to shape this cast. You cast them, you cast these people individually, but you don't know what you have until you put them together. So I always, in pilots, I always will begin by sitting around a big table. And in fact, on Cheers, we sat around the bar. And we talked

about where everybody came from their characters. You know, I carried a conversation on with Sam and Diane and Norm and Cliff and everybody like that. And we talked. And it's not only good for me, it's good for the actors because they're going to want to talk anyway. And if I can do it now and get them to talk and get them, they'll only grow into the roles more. So we spent, you know, We spent half a day just sitting around, probably a day sitting around talking, and then I went to work on it. And it was, you know, I did 240 out of like 275 shows, and I had a great time. I love that show. That's, to me, that's my baby.

And I was there from the beginning for the cast, and I was there at the end, and they trusted me. And we, you know, after a while, we knew what worked and what didn't work. We didn't have to spend a lot of time on stuff that didn't work, and we could make the stuff work that worked really quickly. Cheers were shot in front of a live audience. Do the laughs help the actors? And does it ever work against the show? In other words, because the actors can't pick up and say the next line until the laughs fade.

And, of course, the audience at home isn't in the studio audience. So the timing, do you think the timing when you're watching at home is any different? than the timing when you're in the theater? Well, laughter is communal, so it really helps to have an audience because movies are so much better. I try to go see comedies in a theater rather than try to watch them at home in the movies

because it's really tough to laugh at home. Or I'll get the family in to watch, and then you can all laugh. But it's infectious and it's communal. So those were true laughs, and you can tell their true laughs because you can see the actors' eyes glint on cheers. You can see the glint in their eyes, the excitement and hearing such a big reaction to something they've said. And they had to wait to be heard.

And sometimes they wouldn't wait and have to back up and say, you know, let's go back a little bit. And so they would be heard. But those are true laughs. That show was a truly funny show. Okay. Say you had to back up because they weren't heard. or say you want another take because it didn't work. What happens when the audience is hearing the joke the second time

and their laughter is not going to be the same the second time around? They've already heard the joke. They've already laughed at it. But, yeah, they've laughed at that joke, but then you go the second time so that you can get the reaction of the other person to that joke and then you can hear the other line from the person because they have previously said it into a laugh and you didn't hear it.

So that's why you have to do that. But you'll use the first take of that joke because the laughter was so big. So do you ever use the laughter from one take and roll it for a second take? Yeah. You use when you cross takes, you'll take the laughter from the first take and play it over the reaction in the second take. Right, right. You have to do that. Otherwise, you couldn't make sense of the show of people saying lines into laughs.

You have to hear every line. So we didn't do that a lot. Back in the Cheers days, we only ran the scene twice. I would back up occasionally if somebody said something to laugh. But we didn't run the scene twice like we do now. We ran the cheers scenes only once, and then I would go back if we missed something, or we wanted to change one joke. I would go back and just shoot a piece of the scene again.

On Will and Grace, we do every scene twice. And in between each scene, the writers rewrite some jokes. Really? Yeah. So the audience gets to see two different versions of the scene. Yes, if you're going to do a scene twice, it really helps to change the jokes. Is that typical that the writers are on the set? Typical for you, maybe?

Is it typical for other shows? Oh, yeah. Any sitcom, you've got to see what. I mean, if you're not on the set, you don't know whether to show bombs or not. You've got to be there to see it's either your for you or it's your funeral, but you've got to be there and you've got to fix what doesn't work because that's going off that's going on the air. You don't want something that's no good going on the air,

so you better fix it. James Burroughs, speaking with Terry Gross, recorded in 2006. We'll hear more of their conversation after a break. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air, and we're listening to Terry's 2006 interview with TV director James Burroughs,

who directed over a thousand episodes of cheers, taxi, friends, Frazier, and other sitcoms. He died last week. Now, you know, we were talking about Cheers, and of course, after Cheers, you worked on the spinoff, Frazier, and you directed lots of episodes of that. You were there right at the start. Why was Frazier the character that you all decided to spin off? We didn't. I did not spin them off. David Angel, Peter Casey, and David Lee, who were the producers of Cheers from years, had talked to Kelsey about doing a spin-off. So they wrote the script, and they spun them off. They asked us if they could, and we said, sure.

And they wrote a brilliant script. They, they, their genius in that script was taking an actor who had this incredible ability, which Kelsey has, and taking Frazier, making him Sam alone, because he had to be the center and taking David Hyde Pierce's Niles and making him Frasier. So that was brilliant on their part. And the tone of that show was brilliant, too. So much more upper crusts and cheers. Because other than Martin, the father, there was no other Sam Malones or norms or cliffs on that show. They were all upper crusts, smart people. And they did a brilliant job.

And I directed the pilot, which was huge. And I think I directed about 20, 25 episodes. They did a great job, and they had a great actor and elite and a great cast. I want to play a short scene from the pilot, which you directed of Frazier. And this is a scene from early in the episode, Niles and Frazier are at a coffee shop, and Niles is suggesting it's time to find a convalescent home for their father to live in. We have a problem, and that's why I thought we should talk. Is it dad?

I'm afraid so. One of his old buddies from the police force called this morning. He went over to see him and found him on the bathroom floor. Oh, my God. No, it's okay. He's fine. What is his hip again? Frazier, I don't think he can live alone anymore. What can we do? Well, I know this isn't going to be anyone's favorite solution,

but I took the liberty of checking out a few convalescent homes for him. Miles's a home? He's still a young man. Well, you certainly can't take care of him. You're just getting your new life together. Absolutely. Well, besides, we were never sympathico. Of course, I can't take care of him.

Oh, yes, yes, of course, of course. Why? Because Dad doesn't get along with Maris. Who does? I thought you liked my Maris. I do. I like her from a distance. You know, the way you like the sun.

Maris is like the sun. Except without the warmth. Well, then we're agreed about what to do with Dad. Golden Acres. We care so you don't have to. Well, it might as well. All right, I'll make up the spare bedroom. Oh, you're a good son, Frasier.

Oh, God, I am, I die. Two cafe supremos? Anything to eat? No, I seem to have lost my appetite. I'll have a large piece of cheesecake. It's a scene from the pilot of Frasier, directed by my guest, James Burroughs. And, you know, great scene, great series.

One of the things that's really interesting to me about that scene and about, like, you know, the early, Frasier is that Niles sounds completely different than he did later on. He is not talking about. with that, you know, kind of a feat-clipped style of speech that he develops later in the series? I did not notice that. I always thought that he was, there was no other word to describe Niles than a feat for me, because he was a personification of Frazier, and a Frasier was certainly a feat on Cheers. So I did not know that. I guess I, well, you know what, Nile's.

was a minor character. If you talk to the boys, originally Niles only had one scene in the pilot. And he was an afterthought. They thought the strong relationship would be between father and son. And then because of David, that part expanded rapidly. And thank God, because it was a wonderful relationship. No, you know, a lot of people thought that Niles and Frasier were really two gay men cast as brothers. Do you know what I mean, that the brothers was just to cover, this was a story about really two gay guys. Did you feel that way when you were directing it? Oh, yeah. It's a husband and wife, those two.

Uh-huh. They are. They're a couple. They're a couple. And it's great. I never thought gay as much as a married couple. They talk like a married couple. A snobbish married couple and a feet married couple.

So I totally agree with that. Now, on Will and Grace, there really is a gay character, and it was among the first really popular gay, regular characters on sitcom, on broadcast. Were there issues about how broad to make the character and, you know, how the character should be depicted? it. Well, you know, the genius of that show is the script, is that Max and David wrote a script where there's a love affair between a woman and a man that can't be consummated. So the dialogue is brilliant in that script and very smart. So you have a gay man who you don't play gay, which gives you the liberty to play gay with the other character with Jack. Jack can be incredibly outrageous because Will is not.

Will, you know, he gives you credibility mainly among the gay community. Because I think if Will wasn't on the show, we would get no, we get letters from the gay community about how Jack's portrayed, how that character is portrayed. But because of Will, it allows us to do that. So I always thought of the show as a really funny show that happens to have two gay characters in it. And I firmly believed that, you know, the pilot was through the roof when we ran it in front of an audience. They loved it. We shot it. They loved it.

And I went to the network and I said, please don't put us on us, don't put us after Seinfeld. We cannot survive there because people are not going to watch us. please put us somewhere where we can kind of sneak into town and people can, you know, find us eventually because there's no reason to watch this show. And then I wanted, there's a kiss in the pilot between Will and Grace. And I wanted that in there because I felt that if we could convince the part of the country

that doesn't appreciate gays or does not like gays or has some problems with gays. If we could convince that part of the country that maybe Will will take the super drugs and get over his gayness and marry Grace. And if we let them think that they'll get together, that they maybe tune in to watch the show because they've heard how funny it was.

And then once they're in there and see how funny it is, they're never going to leave. So are you really glad you've been able to have a career in TV? I've been blessed. I did. In 1981, I tried a movie. If I had tried it in 91, the movie probably been more successful because I would have had much more self-esteem than I had in 81. This is before Cheers. I didn't like the process because it took two years to get a result. I didn't like the hours. I'm not a guy who's meticulous with how the set looks and doing each scene. three times so that you can then cut it.

I'm a guy who likes to do it live in front of an audience. And I have been blessed to be able to work in this medium that I don't have to work anymore. I didn't have to do Will & Grace. I'm financially sound, but I do it because I love it. I do it because Will and Grace makes me feel 20 years younger. I've been in the business about 35 years, so I just turned 25 last year. That's how old I am. And I love laughing.

I love to hear the laughter. I've been lucky enough to be associated with some extraordinary shows and shows that may not be as extraordinary, but were so wonderful like news radio, which I did the pilot of. and Third Rock with Johnny Lithgow. And I've had, you know, these wonderful shows. And it just, I'm going to go on next year. I'm not when Will & Grace is off the air. I'm going to try to find another show because I have so much fun doing it.

James Burroughs, thank you so much for talking with us. Thank you so much for all the great programs that you've given us. Thank you. And thank you for some questions I've never been asked before. TV director James Burrow speaking with Terry Gross in 2006. Burroughs died June 19th at the age of 85. Burroughs played a fictional version of himself in the HBO series The Comback starring Lisa Kudrow. In his last appearance in May, his character is asked to direct a pilot of a show written by AI,

and he makes a plea for the creativity and unpredictability of human script writers. Surprising only comes from a group of writers huddled in a corner, beating themselves up to beat out a better joke. Okay. No, no, Val. It's the chubby guy who's a secret alcoholic. It's the gay guy who, despite all the work he's done, still hates himself a little. Or the funny woman who has been invisible for way too long. They turn all that pain into a joke. And Val, those broken, beautiful souls are what made something great. Coming up, Justin Chang reviews the new film The Invite. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. In the new comedy The Invite, Seth Rogan and Olivia Wilde play a San Francisco couple who spend an evening getting to know their upstairs neighbors, played by Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton. It's Wilde's third directorial effort, after her earlier films Book Smart and Don't Worry, Darling. The Invite opens in theaters this week.

Our film critic Justin Chang has this review. In the annals of movies about bickerson couples spending an ill-advised evening together, Olivia Wilde's The Ines, The Involvese, invite falls somewhere between two poles. No, it isn't as good as Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf, Mike Nichols' scalding 1966 adaptation of Edward Albee's classic play. But it's significantly better than Carnage, Roman Polansky's annoying 2010 film of the Yasmina Reza play, God of Carnage. All these movies have a tricky needle to thread. How do you open up a story for the screen when the story is claustrophobic by design. How do you get an audience to feel the tension and heat of marital rage

without driving them toward the exit? In the case of the invite, Wilde and her screenwriters, Will McCormick and Rashida Jones, are working from proven material. This is a remake of a Spanish stage-to-screen adaptation, The People Upstairs, which was released in 2020. It's already inspired remakes set in Italy, Switzerland, France, and South Korea. In this new version, Wilde plays Angela, who lives in a San Francisco apartment

with her husband, Joe, played by Seth Rogen. The film unfolds over a single evening. Their 12-year-old daughter is away at a sleepover, and Angela has invited their upstairs neighbors, Pina and her boyfriend, Hawk, over for wine and Sharkootree. The knives come out, even before the guests show up. Angela is a ball of nerves, anxious to make a good impression. Joe, by contrast, couldn't care less what they think, and he means to confront them about their very noisy sex life, which has woken Joe and Angela up at odd hours of the night. Wilde is a terrific director of actors, herself included,

and she and Rogan are all too persuasive as a long-married couple who know just how to push each other's buttons. Rogan is especially strong. The boisterous good vibes that once powered many a Jud Apatow comedy have hardened into a shell of middle-aged discontent. Pina and Hawk, played by Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton, eventually arrive. Not long afterward, Hawk, who's nothing if not direct, tries to either diffuse or exacerbate the obvious tension in the room.

It took you a while to come to the door, and it sounded like you were arguing. No filter. No, I just want to be honest. We were at the door before we rang, and we could hear you were fighting. Oh, we were talking We were fighting We were fighting, yeah.

A bit of a contentious environment in here So I understand if that's repellent to you, no hard feelings, you know what I mean? Completely understand, you know. We love a contentious environment. We love it. Okay. Well, really, it's fine. You hit the jackpot then, my friend.

As the couples get to know each other, we get to know them too. And we come to understand the roots of Joe and Angela's unhappy. Joe was a once-promising indie rock artist whose career flamed out after one big hit. He now teaches music at a Bay Area Conservatory, and his sense of failure is eating him alive. And Angela hasn't made much use of her art school degree, apart from renovating and redecorating the apartment, her sole creative outlet these days. Pina and Hawk are a model couple by comparison, which makes them irritating and amusing in equal measure. Hauck lays on the flattery and the New Age sensitivity awfully thick, and Norton, not for the first time, expertly blurs the lines between charm and smarm. Pina is a psychotherapist and sexologist, and at first she might seem to veer toward a hot-blooded Euro-seductress caricature.

But Cruz is too vivid to be reduced to a stereotype. Pena is ultimately the one character the movie refuses to mock. She's too comfortable in her own skin, and too ruthlessly accurate in her assessments of Joe and Angela's troubled marriage. Wilde previously directed the enjoyable teen comedy booksmart, and less successfully, the domestic dystopian satire, Don't Worry Darling, an ambitious movie that ultimately proved less interesting than its much publicized behind-the-scenes shenanigans.

It was smart of Wilde to scale back with an intimate chamber piece like The Invite, though here, as in Don't Worry, darling, Her stylistic tics sometimes get the better of her. Early on, Joe and Angela's arguments are almost drowned out by the score's frenzied cello strings, and Wilde is a bit too fond of using the apartment's many, many mirrors, to isolate the characters visually, as if we needed reminding of how fragmented their relationship has become. Pina and Hawk have their own ideas about how to help,

and it's worth seeing the movie yourself to discover what they are. Suffice to say that the title, the invite, has more than one meaning. It's disappointing, though not surprising, and the film pulls back from those ideas. After dangling a more audacious outcome, the invite retreats to a zone of emotional safety, one that's poignant in its own way, though it also feels like a missed opportunity. The movie could have been, dare I say it, a little wilder. Justin Chang is a film critic at The New Yorker. On Monday's show, Chris Everett and Martina Navratilova.

They were tennis champions, the two biggest stars of their generation. They were friends, they were rivals, and after retiring, they got cancer at the same time. Now they're the subject of a new Netflix documentary. I hope you can join us. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorak. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Julian Hertzfeld, Deanna Martinez, and Charlie Kire.

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