Frasier creator James Burrows says sitcoms have evolved to be less funny
Burrows also spoke about his distaste for reboots despite directing two episode of the new Frasier "continuation"
Even though James Burrows—the legendary director and creator behind Cheers, Friends, Will & Grace, and many others—has made a career out of making people laugh, he doesn’t think there’s anything funny about the current state of the multi-camera sitcom.
When The New York Times asked Burrows how he’d seen sitcoms evolve over the course of his career, the director answered: “The one evolution I’ve seen is that a lot of them aren’t funny anymore. The prime requirement of a multicamera sitcom is you’d better be funny.”
He attributes this devolution partly to the rise of the single-camera model, a more cinematic approach to the sitcom that he says gets “chuckles” rather than “guffaws.” It’s also partly because of the streaming model, which allows more creativity with timing and structure (as opposed to the traditional 21-minute slot with space for commercials), to the detriment of the script in his opinion. “You can go up to 30 minutes with a comedy. After that, it gets taxing,” he suggested. “I do love a joke a page. Sometimes two jokes. That doesn’t happen often now.”
His opinion of the recent sitcom revival boom isn’t much sunnier, despite his involvement with nü Frasier (the conceptualization of which he insists he was “not involved in”). “I don’t even call it a revival. I call it a continuation, because it’s not really a reboot. It’s a character moving on, and he’s surrounded by a whole new set of characters, so it’s not really a reboot,” he said, with a definitive follow-up of, “I don’t like them.”
Still, despite this bit of cognitive dissonance, Burrows “had a ball” working on Frasier with his “dear friend” Kelsey Grammer. “That laughter behind me is so rewarding for my soul. If somebody sent me a great script, I would almost do it for free,” he said. “[I]t’s nice to be able to go back to what happened to me 50 years ago and still have this feeling of creativity. When pilot season comes this year, I hope there is a pilot that I like.”
Frasier is currently streaming on Paramount+.