What does a yellow light mean?

NPR's Fresh Air has an interesting interview with James Burrows, "the dean of sitcom directing." Burrows has directed hundreds of episodes of sitcoms including Taxi, Cheers (which he also co-created), Night Court, Frasier, Friends and Will and Grace. For many of them he directed the pilot and helped to set the tone of an entire series.

Audio clips from a few of them are included in the show, including what is, for my money, one of the funniest scenes ever done on television. It's the Taxi scene referenced in my headline above and if you know it, you're smiling already.

How good is his sense of what's going to work? This story isn't in the interview, but I remember reading that when Friends was just staring up, Burrows took the cast on a trip to Vegas and told them to enjoy the last time they were going to be unrecognizable for a long, long time.

There's one story that is in the interview and that I hadn't heard. Burrows has directed most if not all of the episodes of Will & Grace. And in early episodes, he cleverly used misdirection to suggest to viewers who were resistant to Will's homosexuality that he might after all be "cured."

And by the time they realized that was never going to happen, they were already hooked on the show because it was so funny (ah, the glory years of those first couple of seasons). Clever, clever, Mr. Burrows.

Of course, I have to love his repeated insistence that the success or failure of any of his episodes starts on the page and his respect for radio as a smart, funny medium. He comes by it honestly; Burrows' father Abe was a radio writer and playwright who wrote the books for Guys & Dolls and How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.