Tim Bagley shares how James Burrows' 'empathy for LGBTQ people' revolutionized TV

This story originally appeared on Out.James Burrows, the most influential sitcom director in television history, died Friday at age 85. He leaves behind an incredible body of work that includes iconic TV shows Taxi, Cheers, Frasier, Friends, and Will & Grace.Burrows famously used the multi-camera sitcom, one of America's most risk-averse art forms, to make gay people visible, sympathetic, and funny long before Hollywood considered that safe.That instinct showed up early. In January 1983, Cheers, in its first season, aired "The Boys in the Bar," in which Sam Malone's old Red Sox teammate comes out as gay while promoting his autobiography.Sam, frightened of what his regulars will think, stands by him anyway. The episode won a GLAAD Media Award, a remarkable feat for 1983, and was directed by Burrows, who cocreated the show. Related: When George Wendt’s Norm taught us gay stereotypes are the real joke in one of Cheers’ most seminal episodesBurrows kept writing gay, fluid, or queer-coded characters into the biggest comedies on television over the following decades. He always portrayed them as human beings. He shaped some of Friends's most pointed moments, including one of network television's earliest same-sex weddings, and brought warmth to queer-adjacent storylines on Frasier.Most consequentially, he directed every single episode of Will & Grace, more than 240 of them, at a time when a show built around a gay lead was still a network gamble.He kept going almost to the end, directing for Hulu's gay sitcom Mid-Century Modern in his final years. His last onscreen work was a recurring role in the third season of HBO's The Comeback, where he played a fictionalized version of himself directing a sitcom pilot.Few people watched James Burrows work as closely, or for as long, as the out actor Tim Bagley. Bagley's history with Burrows stretches back more than 40 years, to when Bagley took a job as an NBC page fresh out of college and spent his shifts in the bleachers watchi