Welcome to my 100th Couch Avocados header. Next week’s header will be my 101st.
Cheers co-creator James Burrows is swirling in the heavens. In honor of Burrows’s passing, the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Bob James’s “Angela,” the main and end title theme from Taxi, my favorite sitcom out of the many multi-cam sitcoms the legendary TV director—the son of Broadway playwright/director Abe Burrows—frequently directed.
I’m such a Taxi fan that I bought a used copy of Taxi: The Official Fan’s Guide, Frank Lovece and Jules Franco’s out-of-print 1988 book, a few years ago. When I found out on Bluesky about Burrows’s death, I leafed through the book to look up what Lovece and Franco wrote about Burrows’s integral role on Taxi, which ran from 1978 to 1983.
There are a couple of interesting bits of trivia I stumbled into and never knew about previously. The book said that Burrows directed an unsold pilot for Roosevelt and Truman, which starred a pre-Miami Vice Philip Michael Thomas and Art Evans—whom I best remember as the airport chief engineer from Die Hard 2, or as I like to call that sequel, 2 Die 2 Hard—as a pair of bail bondsmen.
After seeing a couple of Roosevelt and Truman publicity stills from CBS on eBay, I want to watch that sitcom pilot, man. (CBS burned it off early on in the summer of 1977, and I mentioned in my Couch Avocados header last week that practice of burning off rejected pilots in the months when barely anybody was watching prime-time TV.)
The other interesting Burrows-related bit from Taxi: The Official Fan’s Guide is that Burrows shot a rejected version of the Taxi opening titles that was a lot different from the classic sequence on the Queensboro Bridge.
“The original concept,” said Taxi co-creator David Davis to Lovece and Franco, “was to have bits and pieces of different cabdrivers [sic] saying a sentence or two of what it’s like to be a cabdriver. So Jim Burrows shot all these pieces and I cut them together. And the idea was good, but it just came out too long. And when we cut it down to just a minute, a minute-and-a-half, it got to be just a lot of rapid talking; it was also hard to work a song into it.”
That sounds to me like the first-season opening titles from Rhoda, the Mary Tyler Moore Show spinoff Davis, a few other Taxi writers, and Burrows worked on before Taxi. Rhoda narrated her life story in the first version of the frequently revamped opening titles.
Valerie Harper’s narration perfectly suited her show because Rhoda was such a chatterbox. With the help of rapid-fire animation techniques that were innovative at the time and were done by Braverman Productions, collage animator Chuck Braverman’s company, the sequence told you upfront that she’s a charming and self-deprecating chatterbox instead of a really annoying one.
The looped footage of a not-very-visible Tony Danza driving a cab on the Queensboro Bridge worked better for Taxi than the chatty Rhoda approach.
“It was only about thirty seconds long. We had to extend it by repeating the middle part a couple of times. You can see [the jump cuts] happening when a couple of the actors’ names pop on and off,” said Davis, who shot the footage of Danza in the cab, to Lovece and Franco.
The visible jump cuts resulted in a darkly funny encapsulation of Taxi’s premise of New Yorkers who are trapped in a job they don’t want.
Add to the Queensboro Bridge footage James’s melancholy but cool-sounding “Angela,” which originated as a theme for the Angela Matusa character (a self-loathing call center operator who is ashamed of her weight) in the first-season episode “Blind Date,” and you have a distinctive sitcom opening that’s nothing like the happy, peppy, and bursting-with-love intros from ’70s sitcoms like The Brady Bunch and Happy Days.
It’s more like an opening from a much later series like The “Slap” Maxwell Story or Atlanta—two examples of moody and gritty single-camera comedies that were closer in tone to Taxi than to The Brady Bunch. (“Angela,” which wasn’t written for the opening or closing credits, wasn’t even the first choice for the opening titles. The James instrumental the Taxi producers wanted their show to open with at first was a more upbeat instrumental that ended up as the title track on Touchdown, James’s 1978 album. Davis said that “Touchdown” was nixed because it was just “too brassy, too big.”)
One of the reasons why Taxi quickly gelled as a moody and gritty sitcom was because Burrows—whom the Taxi cast affectionately called “Beads” due to, as Danny DeVito once said, his eyes looking like beads by the end of the week—knew how to communicate to actors like the rambunctious regulars on Taxi and give them enough room to play.
“[The Taxi cast] came to me with their skills in place,” said “Beads” to Lovece and Franco. “I didn’t teach them how to do anything, really. I just feel like the guy who has the ability to keep them all together, all these multitalented people, to get them to perform in an ensemble situation. I think that helped make Taxi a success, this wonderful feeling you get when you turn the dial and see people who so enjoy working with one another.”
When the Los Angeles Times interviewed Burrows about Taxi in 1995, he compared himself to a wrangler.
“There were a lot of egos on that show. I was really a wrangler to get the ensemble nature. That was my job—check your ego at the door,” said Burrows to the L.A. Times.
In Lovece and Franco’s book, Carol Kane’s memories of how Burrows communicated with Taxi regulars jumped out at me. That was because some of the sitcom stars who paid tribute to Burrows after the news of his death had similar memories of how he worked with them.
“By the time I got there [as a performer on Taxi], Jim Burrows was practically doing things without words. He was saying things like ‘D’ [meaning Danny], and he’d point at a vague spot on the floor, and Danny would know where Jimmy wanted him to go and why. They had it down to sign language practically,” said Kane to Lovece and Franco.
The results of Burrows’s rapport with actors are evident in “Reverend Jim: A Space Odyssey,” the Glen and Les Charles-scripted Taxi episode that added Christopher Lloyd as the spaced-out Reverend Jim to the cast after Lloyd’s first appearance as Jim about a year before “RJASO” satisfied James L. Brooks and the other Taxi producers so much that they considered bringing him back. When Burrows’s death was announced, the first thing I thought of was one of two comic centerpieces from “RJASO.” Many Taxi fans consider the driving test scene from “RJASO” (“What does a yellow light mean?”) to be the show’s funniest moment, but an even funnier comic centerpiece is the scene that precedes it.
Alex and the other cabbies want to help out an unemployed Jim and get him to become a cabbie for the Sunshine Cab Company. But a cranky Louie refuses to allow him to become one, so Jim spikes Louie’s coffee with a tranquilizer. Alex, the often exasperated voice of reason on Taxi, scolds Jim, but then he witnesses the immediate changes to Louie’s personality and thinks, “Aw, fuck it”—while the greatest rendition of “Moonlight Bay” outside of Porky Pig’s rendition in My Favorite Duck emerges in the garage.
TV Guide named Louie as the greatest TV character of all time in 1999. (I still have that 1999 TV Guide “50 Greatest Characters Ever” issue with me.) I’m not sure if I agree with that, but Louie is definitely one of the greatest because he could be the villain in one episode and a less despicable character in the next one, and either version worked because DeVito was just so damn delightful to watch in the role of Louie. In “RJASO,” he was the villain that week. The tranquilizer scene is a bit more enjoyable to me than the driving test scene between Lloyd and Jeff Conaway because a villain gets his comeuppance in a harmonious way that allowed every regular in the cast to shine, and it was all wonderfully directed by Burrows.
“I can usually tell a Jim Burrows’ directed [sic] show just by watching it. How? A lot of the camera angles aren’t perfect,” said Cheers writer Ken Levine when he described Burrows as “the Willie Mays of directing” on his Blogspot blog in 2016. “In some cases there are shots that look downright sloppy. But Jim understands that performance and energy are more important than precision. So if an actor doesn’t exactly hit his mark, so what? The payoff is that the scenes have more energy and the actors seem looser, more natural… funnier.”
That’s exactly what happened in the two comic centerpieces from “RJASO”: There are one or two imperfect shots by the camera crew as those folks tried to keep up with the actors’ energy. But it doesn’t matter because Burrows formed a creative environment where the actors became as loose and natural as possible, and the studio audience—as well as thousands of Taxi fans—loved whatever the actors were doing.
Levine also praised how Burrows would sometimes get visually creative. He said, “Watch the first year of CHEERS. You’ll see fabulous shots looking down hallways or shot from unusual angles. He really sold the bar as a character.”
We should do that: Watch the first year of Cheers or any Burrows-directed episode from one of Cheers’s subsequent seasons—or maybe rewatch Taxi or any episode of the original Will & Grace (Burrows directed every episode of that groundbreaking LGBTQ sitcom)—to see again a master at work behind the camera or to better understand why the likes of Levine and Carol Kane praised him when he was alive, while your sides are, of course, splitting from laughter.
Today’s prompt: Do you have a favorite set from Taxi, Cheers, and Frasier (another sitcom where Burrows was one of the directors)? Many fans of the Cheers/Frasier shared universe would say that for them, it’s either Sam’s titular bar (designed by the late Richard Sylbert, who won an Oscar for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’s production design) because it looks cozy and inviting (“James Burrows had a lot of input into the design which is why it was so easy to shoot in it,” wrote Levine in 2017) or Dr. Frasier Crane’s Seattle apartment (designed by the late Roy Christopher) because of its lavishness and the fond memories they have of Eddie, Martin’s dog, running around and mischievously turning Frasier’s apartment into his playground.
Meanwhile, my favorite set from the three shows is the Sunshine Cab Company garage because of its grunginess and massive space. (Cheers art director Herman Zimmerman’s set design for the Promenade aboard Deep Space Nine is my favorite set design from the ’90s Star Trek shows because, like the Sunshine Cab Company garage, it’s massive.) That spaciousness led to many playful and immaculately blocked scenes like the above “Moonlight Bay” scene. Unfortunately, there’s no information in Taxi: The Official Fan’s Guide or on the internet about who exactly designed the set of the garage. That dude was—like the late, great Burrows—a genius.