James Burrows could always hear the laughter, long before anybody else could.
Burrows, who died this week at the age of 85, was the unquestioned GOAT of multi-camera sitcom directors. For half a century, if you were shooting a TV comedy on a stage in front of a live studio audience, you wanted Burrows behind the camera. He co-created Cheers. He directed the pilots for Friends, Frasier, Taxi, and Will & Grace, among many, many others. There was a span of from 1980 until the mid-2000s where he was nominated for an Emmy in every year but one. He was great with actors, and had an uncanny knack for taking scripts that were good, or even great, and finding ways to improve them with how he directed them.
And he did a lot of that by listening.
The son of composer, writer, and librettist Abe Burrows (who wrote the book for Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying), Jim Burrows grew up around the theater. Before breaking into television in 1974 with an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, he directed plays and musicals for the stage. Multi-cam sitcoms are essentially filmed stage plays, so the transition was natural in many ways. A trait he carried from one medium to the next was his fondness for spending time backstage during rehearsals.
"He would pace the set and sometimes just listen to the scene instead of looking at it being performed," recalls Abbott Elementary showrunner Justin Halpern, whose very first script, the pilot for a sitcom adaptation of his memoir $h*! My Dad Says, was directed by Burrows. "He said he was listening for a musicality and rhythm to it and he wanted to hear if it was working."