James Burrows, the man who taught America how to laugh in three-camera harmony, has died at 85. He directed 237 episodes of Cheers alone, not to mention his foundational work on Friends, Taxi, and Will & Grace. In doing so, he became the invisible hand behind the last golden age of the network sitcom, an era now as dead as the Roman Republic.
Burrows was not a flashy auteur. He had no Kubrickian obsessions, no Tarantinoesque bloodlust. He was a craftsman of timing, of blocking, of the precise beat between a joke and its reaction.
His genius was in making the technical invisible. When Sam Malone first walked into that Boston bar, when Chandler Bing delivered a one-liner, Burrows was the puppet master pulling strings of light and sound with surgical precision. But his passing marks more than a personal loss.
It signals the final end of a monoculture where 30 million Americans would gather around their cathode-ray tubes to watch the same jokes, the same sighs, the same variations on romantic tension. Today we have a thousand streaming services, each with their own niche: a fracturing of attention that Edward Gibbon would recognise as the prelude to cultural collapse. The decline is not just in ratings but in ambition.
Network sitcoms now aspire to be “elevated,” to be “prestige,” to avoid the taint of being merely funny. Burrows knew that true comedy was the highest art: a perfect miniature of the human condition compressed into 22 minutes. He was the last great Roman of the television world, building aqueducts of laughter that would sustain an empire.
Now the aqueducts are dry. We have irony, we have meta-humour, we have self-deprecating millennial angst. But we no longer have the pure, clean structure of a joke well told.
Burrows’s death is a mirror held up to our current intellectual decadence: a world so obsessed with deconstructing comedy that we have forgotten how to construct it. We should mourn him, but we should also fear what his passing says about us: that we are a civilisation that has forgotten how to be funny. And when a civilisation forgets how to laugh, it is usually not long before it forgets how to live.
