Allan Burns, Writers etc.

Over the last few months I've been on a nice Mary Tyler Moore Show run.  Obviously like everybody else I was bummed when Cloris Leachman died last week, and now there's another important loss, Alan Burns. Everybody in the world knows his writing partner James L. Brooks, but I'd only ever noticed Burns' name in the title card sequence at the beginning of the show. From longtime sitcom writer, Ken Levine:

His writing was hilarious but always rooted in humanity. As funny as THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW was, to me the key was that you always cared — cared about the characters, cared about their problems — and much of that came from Allan.  The laughs were relatable, universal, and never mean spirited.  

When David Isaacs and I were doing that later show for Mary Tyler Moore, Allan was an invaluable resource; gracious with his time and advice.  

I’d go to lunch with him from time to time and never could believe he was treating me as a peer.  This was comedy royalty.  When David and I were starting out, we wrote spec episodes of THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW and RHODA.  Allan and his partner Jim Brooks were our idols.  Their shows were the gold standard.  We studied them.  Frankly, I was more impressed meeting Allan Burns than Mary Tyler Moore.  

I probably noticed this more harshly because of a romanticized way I think of "old school" sitcom writers and their partners: Brooks/Burns, Levine/Isaacs etc, creating and writing all the episodes of a series. But that's not really what happened with TMTM show either. That would be a much more British system, not an American one:

I feel like writers of British sitcoms are more celebrated than American writers. Maybe it’s because American sitcoms have always been 22+ episodes a season, they’ve had to have teams of writers thrown at them. British sitcoms, with their 6-7 episode series (seasons, to you American rubes), must more easily lend themselves to having a single writer commanding the entire thing. Everybody in England knows who Richard Curtis is, they all know Graham Linehan, they know Gervais/Merchant. Above all may be John Sullivan, who of course created and wrote every episode of Only Fools and Horses, but about a dozen more sitcoms as well along the way. Does anybody really know who wrote Friends? Or Frasier? And does anybody care?