James Burrows is by far the preeminent person in the world of TV comedy directing, with 27 all-time nominations in the category versus only 10 for runner-up Jay Sandrich. But on the heels of that 27th nomination, for Hulu’s “Mid-Century Modern,” the 84-year-old director isn’t feeling optimistic about his specialty, the once popular but now increasingly marginalized multi-cam sitcoms.
Filmed in front of a live studio audience, those shows ruled the airwaves in years past and include many of the most successful series in television history. Burrows had a hand in lots of them, directing multiple episodes of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Cheers,” “Taxi,” “Frasier,” “Friends” and “Will & Grace” — and reminiscing just makes him sadder, as multi-cam sitcoms have largely been replaced by single-camera shows shot on stages or on location without an audience. (Emmy rules, though, still guarantee one multi-cam directing nominee if enough episodes are entered.)
“I’ve been to the funeral for the multi-camera comedy about nine times,” Burrows said. “And this time, I’m wearing a dark suit.”
He shook his head slowly. “It’s really strange that this form has dissipated so much. It’s cheaper to do than any other comedy, and you’ve got to be really funny because you have 300 people telling you whether your joke works or not, not a bunch of writers in front of a TV saying, ‘Oh, that’s hysterical!’ with no audience to corroborate it.”
This year, Burrows is particularly disappointed that he’s the only person from “Mid-Century Modern” to receive a nomination. The show itself and its leads, including Nathan Lane (“he’s a comic genius”), came up empty-handed. “I bear the burden for all those people,” he said. “The show was wonderful and funny and heartfelt, and it’s just a shame that nobody else was recognized.” And the series has yet to receive a second-season pickup — “not a good sign” — so he’s skeptical about its future.
Directing in the multi-cam format, he said, requires “a completely different skill set” from single-cam. “There’s a lot of cinematic stuff in the other comedies, in ‘The Bear’ and ‘Hacks’ and ‘The Studio,’ with these wild camera shots. I don’t do that. I did one or two wild camera shots early on in ‘Taxi,’ but it’s not my wheelhouse.”
That wheelhouse, he added, has not changed dramatically since he left his job as a theater director to work on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” in the mid-1970s. “You get the words, you rehearse and put the words on their feet, you run it a couple of times, you add what you can to make it funnier,” he said. “You show it to the writers, and they take it and go upstairs and rewrite based on what they saw. And that’s how it works.”
But the “Here’s to You, Mrs. Schneiderman” episode of “Mid-Century Modern,” for which Burrows is nominated, needed special treatment. While the series was on its holiday break in December 2024, costar Linda Lavin died of a heart attack due to complications from lung cancer.
In one of the first episodes after their return, Burrows and series creators David Kohan and Max Mutchnick had to walk a fine line as Bunny Schneiderman (Lane) learns that his mother has died and mourns her with his friends Jerry Frank (Matt Bomer) and Arthur Broussard (Nathan Lee Graham).
“We had to get our sadness out but be careful that the pathos doesn’t screw up the comedy,” Burrows said. “The first two scenes are (Bunny) trying to find his Fig Newtons. Those had to be really funny and outrageous so that the moment we discover him sitting on the steps and he says his mom has died, you can buy some time to play the pathos.”
That scene, which appears about a third of the way through the episode, marks a dramatic shift. “I think Bomer has one small joke in it, and it’s a five-minute scene,” Burrows said. “In any normal sitcom, you would never do that. But we had the right to do it. And then the last two scenes are really funny, but they’re still in that sad phase. The pathos is there, but we don’t play it up like we did in that one scene where he talks about it.”
Still, the laughter keeps bringing Burrows back to multi-cam TV. “It’s the old Norman Cousins thing,” he said, referring to the journalist who was given a few months to live in 1964 but underwent a novel treatment that included viewing comedy films and TV.
“He watched Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields tapes when he was sick, and he got better. I like to think of myself as adding a few years to my life by laughing so hard at these shows.”
This story first appeared in the Down to the Wire: Comedy issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
