James Burrows, Director of 'Cheers' and 'Will & Grace,' Dies at 85

There is one shot every one of us remembers without realizing we remember it: a door swings open, someone walks into a bar, and the entire room shouts his name. That moment, in which the viewer feels welcome without quite knowing why, was no accident, no happy fluke on set. It was the signature of James Burrows, a man who knew exactly where to place the camera so the audience would feel as if it, too, were sitting at the counter.

Burrows died on Friday, June 19, at the age of 85, in his sleep, after a short illness and surrounded by his family. The news was not confirmed until late that evening, so it reached us on this side of the Atlantic with a delay that feels almost unfair for someone whose work had been entering our living rooms for decades.

The son of legendary Broadway author Abe Burrows, he grew up treating comedy as a trade rather than as inspiration descending from the heavens. That is precisely what explains his directorial poetics: for him everything was a matter of precision, of timing, of rhythm. With Glen and Les Charles he created “Cheers” in 1982, a series about a Boston bar where almost nothing happens, which ran for eleven seasons and became one of the cornerstones of the genre. He directed most of its 278 episodes and in doing so established the grammar by which sitcoms would be shot for decades to come.

How do you build an invisible directorial signature?

What sets Burrows apart is the paradox that his greatest achievement was to go unnoticed. A multi-camera sitcom shot before a live audience looks simple, almost like a filmed stage play, and that is exactly why it is so deceptively hard. The actors have to play a scene in one breath, the laughter arrives live, and the director has no luxury of patching the rhythm in the edit. Burrows built that dramatic arc in rehearsal, patiently, until the comedy looked as if it had simply happened on its own.

His touch was so reliable that it became a kind of insurance within the industry. Studios called him to direct pilots because it was believed he could capture that elusive something that makes a viewer come back the following week. So he signed the first episodes of “Friends,” “Frasier,” “The Big Bang Theory” and “Taxi,” shows that later went their own way but set out from his starting line. With “Will & Grace” he went a step further and directed all 246 episodes, a rare instance of consistency in a medium that loves to swap people out.

What remains once the lights go down?

It is easy to reduce Burrows’s body of work to numbers, and the numbers are impressive: eleven Emmy Awards, five Directors Guild of America honors, close to 1,000 episodes. Yet those figures, however resonant, miss the point. His legacy lies not in trophy cabinets but in the fact that he defined, for several generations, what the feeling of pleasant company assembled from invented people actually looks like.

At a time when television is migrating to streaming, when series are swallowed in one sitting and forgotten by the next weekend, Burrows’s work recalls a different contract with the audience, one built on ritual and repetition, on the sense that there is a place where everybody knows your name. Perhaps that is why his shows do not age. And the next time someone walks through a television door and the whole room shouts his name, will we even pause to think of the man who taught us to do it?