Reflecting on a blessed career

This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies . Today we remember James Burrows, 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, Frasier, Will and Grace, and many other sitcoms. Burrows died june nineteenth at the age of eighty five . A statement by the Director's Guild of America described him as an incredib ly generous colleague, sharing his wisdom and warm humor with all he worked with. In a statement, his family said, Burrows understood that great comedy was never simply about laughter. It was about humanity , connection, and truth. We're going to listen to Terry's two thousand six interview with James Burrows in a few minutes, but first we have this appreciation by RTV critic David Bian Cooley. James Burrows was born in LA in nineteen forty, but didn't live there long . His family moved to New York when he was five . His father, Abe Burrows, had written for radio and television, but found his biggest success on Broadway as a direct, or, and especially as a writer. A Burrows wrote the books for the musical's Guys and Dolls, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and Cancan . 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 Burrows landed jobs directing multiple episodes of many popular sitcoms of the nineteen seventies , including The Bob Newhard Show, the Tony Randall Show, Laverne and Shirley, and Taxi . By the time he co created cheers with Glenn and Les Charles in nineteen eighty two , James Burrows was considered the best sitcom director in the business , a title he maintained for decades. The reasons were obvious . James Burrows 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. Burrows added a fourth camera, which allowed him to capture more close ups and frame the action as naturally as he could. Burrows 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 eleven Emmy Awards and directed a staggering number of TV pilots, specifically seventy five . But it isn't just the quantity of premiere episodes directed by James Burrows that's so amaz . It's the quality . He directed the introductory episodes of Taxi, Cheers, and Frasier, not just the original nineteen ninety three Frasier, but the twenty twenty three remake as well thirty years later . He also directed the first episodes of The Big Bang Theory, Nightcourt, Wings , News Radio, Third Rock from the Sun, Darma 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 two hundred episodes of both Will and Grace and Cheers and seventy five episodes of Tax i . For me, the absolute best example of Jim Burrows' gifts as a TV director came in a nineteen seventy nine 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 sixties 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 prime time TV show , but Taxi already had triumphed by mixing types of comic styles that shouldn't have worked. Jud Hersch, 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 help shape what I consider the funniest scen e 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 Burrow s 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, Marylou Henner's Elaine, 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. 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? 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 a test . No, no, no, this is the application. Oh man is getting rough for a look . Eventually, Reverend Jim gets a copy of the test, slumps in his classroom style desk, and gets stuck on the first question . His cabby 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 Burrows lets the scene build and flow . And listen to the studio audience. They're not just laughing, they're howling What does hell like me? Slow down . Okay , Low , light deep . Slow down . Okay God yell by me slow I'm guessing you had your own favorite memories and favorite laughs from a sitcom directed by James Burrows , 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 Burrows no matter where you look is bound to make you sm . David Ban Cooley is our TV critic. Terry Gross spoke to James Burroughs in two thousand six. He got his start in television directing episodes of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, the Bob Newhart Show, and Lavern Shirley . But before that he worked on some of his father's musicals. His father, A Burrs, 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 Tiffany's , where I met Mary Talomore and Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlain were the stars . And I went on subsequently to stage manage for my father on cactus flower the production on the road and then in New York City in forty carrots. So I got to see my father who 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 show s in in the theater. He would always walk behind the set . He wouldn't watch because 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 trou ble . So I do that when I direct my shows. So that, you know, that is the essence of the experience with my father. In subsequent years 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 don't I never look at the monitor because 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 worri ed 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 forty carrots around the country, I would work at a lot of dinner theaters, a lot of regional not regional theatre, dinner theaters, summer stock theaters . I would do these situations, these not situation comedies. These comedies odd couple, barefoot in the park , even Blise 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, I turned on television, there was a Mary Tyler Moore show , and they were doing twenty minutes a week in front of a live audience. And here I was doing one hundred twenty minutes a week to get ready for a live audience. And 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 Tala Moore. 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 that the rest is history. So you got started directing MTM productions like the Bob Newhart show, Mary Taylor M oore Show, Phyllis Yes ? Yes No, were you at first like understudying other directors or did let you just go at it? Well, 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 rehears 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 camer as came in that it became daunting. So I watched for maybe two months straight, I watched the New Heart Show, then I went over to the Mary Tellamore Show and I watched Jay Sandrich, 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 . And I would coach, I was Paul Sand's dialogue coach. I would help him run lines. But in a times 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, 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 Lou Grant moves into Roda's apartment. So he's living above Mary, which means that he worked 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 a dis 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 I was so dealing with a cast who hated the script two, and yet I had to run these scenes . And so I would do it. And I can't tell you, I invoke Checkov, I invoke Strinberg, I invoked Kaufman and Hawk. 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. I didn't 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 alright and Jay Sandrich 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 Phillip 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 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 I by the lucky by the luck of the draw, by the luck of the drawer, I got I didn't get the Emmy show. I got an OK show. And it might have helped me because of the amount of work I had to do and the amount of in the amount of talking and inspiring I had to do might have 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 tax i, and about how many episodes would you estimate you did of taxi? I think I did seventy five . And you were there right from the beginning with taxi, right? I was there. It was after 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 tough show. And then I did a show with Ned Baty. I was all a hired hand. I didn't do many pilots or anything like that. And then the boys from MTM , Ed Weinberg, Jim Brooks, Stan Daniels and Dave Davis had created a show called Taxi and they called me to direct it . And 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 room. There wasn't a room big enough . And it was 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 the producers of that show and the head writers were Glenn Charles and Les Charles who had first met on on Phyllis and then they were brought in on taxi. So we started 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 start ed 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 laughs I had ever done on taxi . And so I have I have fond memories of that show. It's also a great learning experience. James Burroughs, speaking with Terry Gross in two thousand six . He died last week at the age of eighty five. Here's one of the scenes from episode three of Cheers with Ted Danson and Shelley Long, which Burrows 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 your rat parts. I'd hate to see the bowling alleys cl ose on my account. 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? Uhhuh. Uh huh . Yeah, well, you know, I've never met an intelligent woman that I'd want to date. On behalf of the intelligent wom en around the world , may I just say Coming up, we'll hear about Burrow's work on Cheers and Fraser, 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 like to get away ? This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. We're remembering James Bur roughs, who was one of the most respected TV directors in the business . He directed over a thousand episodes of cheers, taxi, friends, Frasier, Will and Grace , and also the Big Bang Theory, Third Rock from the Sun, Mike and Molly, and two broke girls. Burrows died last week at the age of eighty five. He spoke with Terry Gross in two thousand six. 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 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 has to be on the page . So I'm very careful when I select scripts. And when we talked about Glen Leson 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 when a month later when I read it 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? would be a That terrible 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, you'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 b ar, but you got to listen to that show. It's all about listening. Absolutely. Yeah. There's no eye candy in that show. I'll never forget originally the boys 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 was 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 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 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 two hundred forty out of like two hundred sev andenty five shows . And I had a great time. I love that show. That 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 you know, we 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, you know, 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, like because the actors can't like 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, yeah, laughter is communal , so it really helps have 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 you just 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 they're 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 to wait 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, we'll say you had a backup 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 it's not going to be the same the second time around. They've already heard the joke. They've already laughed at it . But you're 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 ? So 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 . So you have to do that. Otherwise you couldn't make sense of the show of people saying lines and to 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 at, 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 hear 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? It's typical for you , is it typical for other shows? Oh yeah. Any sitcom, you got to see what I mean, if you're not on the set, you don't know whether to show bombs or not. You got to be there to see it's either your it's either euphoria or it's your funeral , but you got to be there and you got to you got to fix what doesn't work because that's going off on that's going on the air. And you don't want something that's no good going on the air, so you better fix it . James Burrow, speaking with Terry Gross, recorded in two thousand six. 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 two thousand six interview with TV director James Burrows , who directed over a thousand episodes of cheers, taxi, friends, Frasier, 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 Frasier, and you directed lots of episodes of that. You were there right at the start . Why was Frasier 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 for years , had talked to Kelsey about doing a spin . So they wrote the script and they spun him off, they asked us if he if they could, and we said, sure . And they wrote a brilliant script. They their genius in that script was taking an act or who had this incredible ability, which Kelsey has and taking Fraser, making him Sam alone because he had to be the center and taking David Hyde Piers Ncedil hises n andail making him Frasi er . So that was brilliant on their part . And the tone of that show was brilliant to the so much more uppercrust than cheers because other than Martin , the father, there was no other samalones or norms or cliffs on that show. They were all uppercross smart people . And they did a brilliant job. And I directed the pilot which was huge and I think I directed about twenty twenty five episodes . They did a great job and they had a great actor in the lead and a great cast. I want to play a short scene from the pilot which you directed of Fras ier. And this is a scene from early in the episode Niles and Frasier 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? 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. I don't know. It's okay. He's fine. What is his hip again? Fraser, 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. Nyle'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 Simpotico . Of course, I can't take care of him ? G,ong yes, yes, 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 . It says that well, it might as well . All right, I'll make up the spare bedroom. Oh , you're a good son, Fresh or God, I am, Auntie 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 Fraser, directed by my guest James Burrows. And you know, great scene, great series. One of the things that's really interesting to me about that scene and about like the early Fraser is that Nyles sounds completely different than he did later on. He is not talking with that, you know, kind of a feet 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 describ Nediles than a fe at for me because he was a person ification of Frasier and if Fraser was certainly a feat on cheers . So I did not know that . I guess I well, you know what , Niles was a minor character. If you 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, it was 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 a cover that 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 w aife, those two. 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 feat married couple . So I totally agree with that. Now unwill and grace , there really is a gay character and it was among the first really pop gay regular characters in Sitcom on Sitcom's and on broadcast , were there issues about how broad to make the character and, you know , how the character should be depicted ? 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 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 notes we get letters from the gay community about how Jacks portrayed how that character's 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 the don't put us off the 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 a pilot between Will and Grace . And I wanted that in there because I felt 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, we'll take the super drugs and get over his gayness and marry grace and if they if we 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 nineteen eighty one , I tried a movie . If I had tried it in ninety one, the movie probably been more successful because I would have had much more self esteem than I had in ' eighty one . 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 and grace. I'm financially sound and but I do it because I love it. I do it because Will and Grace makes me feel twenty years younger . I've been in the business thirty five years so I just turned twenty five last year old I am And I love laughing, I love to hear the laughter. I've done an extra I've been lucky enough to be associated with some extraordinary shows and shows that may not be as extraordinary but 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. When Mullingrace is off the air, I'm going to try to find another show because I have so much fun doing it. Well, James Burrows, 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 two thousand six, Burrows died Junee ninetenth at the age of eighty five . Burrows played a fictional version of himself in the HBO series The Combat starring Lisa Cudre . 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, but no, no at all. 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's been invisible for way too long , they turn all that pain into a joke . And Val, those broken, beautiful souls are what makes something great. Coming up, Justin Chang reviews the new film The Invite. This is Fresh Air . This is Fresh Air. In the new comedy The Invite, Seth Rogan and Olivia Wilde play a San Franc isco 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 the theaters this week. Our film critic Justin Chang has this review. In the Annals of movies about Bickersome couples spending an ill advised evening together , Olivia Wilde's The Invite falls somewhere between two poles . No, it isn't as good as Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe, Mike Nichols Scalding nineteen sixty six adaptation of Edward Alby's classic play . But it's significantly better than Carnage, Roman Polanski's annoying twenty ten 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 twenty twenty . It's already inspired remakes set in Italy, Switzerland, France, and South Korea . In this new version, Wild plays Angela, who lives in a San Francisco apartment with her husband, Joe, played by Seth Rog an . The film unfolds over a single evening . Their twelve year old daughter is away at a sleepover , and Angela has invited their upstairs neighbors, Pina and her boyfriend, Hawk, over for wine in charcuterie . 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. Wild 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 Judapita 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 fair. 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 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, 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 unhappiness . 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. Hawk 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 Euroseductrous caricature . But Cruz is too vivid to be reduced to a stereotype. Pina 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. Wild 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 wild to scale back with an intimate chamber piece like the Invite , though here, as in don't worry darling, her stylistic ticks 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 remind ing 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, that 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 Cheng is a film critic at the New Yorker. On Monday Show Chris Everett and Martina Navreatalova. 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's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. 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