Mary Tyler Moore Gave James Burrows His Big Break When He Fixed a Bad Script of Her Show

As a television director, James Burrows is responsible for bringing pilots like Friends, Will & Grace and even Two and a Half Men to air. His career in television goes back to The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and it was Moore herself who gave him the break that got his career started. 

Burrows spoke about his career on Alan Alda’s Clear + Vivid podcast on June 13. He told the story of how he got his first TV directing job, and proved himself to Moore. Burrows’ book, Directed by James Burrows, is now available and includes stories from Cheers, Taxi, Friends, Will & Grace and more. 

James Burrows was directing theater before ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’

Burrows recounted his early theater days to Alda. 

“I was in Wallingford, Connecticut directing a production of 40 Carats with Joan Fontaine,” Burrows said on Clear + Vivid. “I went home one Saturday night after rehearsal, turned on the TV. And there was the Mary Tyler Moore Show. I had never seen it before. I looked at it and I said, ‘Wow, there’s an audience laughing, so that’s a theatrical piece that’s being filmed.’ So I thought to myself, ‘Why don’t I write her a letter?’ Because I was doing a 2 hour play in a week and they were doing 25 minutes in a week and I thought I could do that.”

The hustle paid off. The Mary Tyler Moore Show flew Burrows to Los Angeles.

“I wrote her a letter,” Burrows continued. “About two weeks later, after I came back from directing somewhere else at some other dinner theater, I got a letter from Grant Tinker. Grant said, ‘We’re interested in theatrical directors.’ MTM had four multicamera sitcoms on the air. It’s theater that’s being filmed. They brought me out to do one show.”

James Burrows impressed Mary Tyler Moore

The Mary Tyler Moore Show ran for seven seasons, but not every single show was a winner. Such was the one with which Burrows was saddled.

So I got this Mary Tyler Moore script. We read it around a table. And I said to Artie Price, who then was second in command at MTM, ‘In a sea of danish, I get a bagel.’ It was not a good script. So back in those days, you would read the script and then you would immediately go and rehearse. We read the script, then I go down and rehearsed stuff that I knew would never be in the show but I had to do it. While I was doing it, the writers were rewriting. Later in the day I would get the new version of the old script that I rehearsed and I would have to do the new script. There would be runthroughs and rewrites. I did everything. I tried to put as much physical business into it as I could.

James Burrows, Clear + Vivid, 6/13/22

The effort paid off. Burrows would direct three more Mary Tyler Moore episodes but many more shows for her studio.

“The show was maybe a C- when we read it and it became a C+,” Burrows said. “But just before we shot the show, I was walking backstage and Mary came out of her trailer and looked at me and said, ‘We feel our investment in you has worked out.’ I was blown away by that.” 

James Burrows did his homework on the show 

Before his episode, Burrows brushed up. He became close with director Jay Sandrich so he wasn’t starting his Mary Tyler Moore episode from square one.

“I was petrified,” Burrows admitted. “I had watched the show because I had become friendly with Jay Sandrich, I would watch Jay work. And he would take me to lunch, I would ask him questions. We became quite close friends because the day I met him, he had a wedding ring on. The next day when I came to see a show, he didn’t have one on. So he was just getting divorced. I guess I was his new friend at that point.”