For a decade, Everybody Loves Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal had been trying to get a reunion off the ground but couldn’t get an interested buyer. That changed this year, with Everybody Loves Raymond: 30th Anniversary Reunion, which is airing Nov. 24 on the series’ original network, CBS.
Why did he keep at it for so many years?
“I wanted to see my friends and celebrate our nice show,” Rosenthal said in explaining why the 30th Anniversary Reunion special is being released 29 years after Everybody Loves Raymond‘s premiere.
While he and series star Ray Romano loved the idea of a reunion, they both are against a reboot.
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“Many shows do reboots, and we’ve never wanted to do that,” Rosenthal said. “We felt like we couldn’t honestly do one since some of the cast isn’t with us anymore, and they were essential to the success of the show. Also, Ray and I both believe that reboots generally are never as good as the original.”
Since the Emmy-winning family comedy Everybody Loves Raymond ended its nine-season run in 2005, three of the show’s stars, Doris Roberts and Peter Boyle, who played Ray Barone’s (Romano) parents, and Sawyer Sweeten, who played one of Ray and Debra’s (Patricia Heaton) sons, died, along with Fred Willard and Georgia Engel who recurred as the in-laws of Ray’s brother Robert (Brad Garrett).
“We don’t want to do it because It would never be as good,” Romano added. “First of all, even if every cast member was alive and well, they’re never as good as when the show was thriving and we were younger. And the fact that the mother and the father and one of the kids is gone, and also a couple of the guest stars are gone, we would be doing a disservice to the show. They are such a major dynamic and element of what made the show work, it would almost feel disrespectful to them to even try to do it. I think even before, had the other actors still been around, I still think we would decide against doing a reboot.
“But doing a reunion is something that we want to do, because we get a chance, first of all, to see each other and talk about [the series] and show clips and but also to honor those actors,” Romano added.
There is another reason Rosenthal sees no purpose in rebooting Everybody Loves Raymond.
“Because we’re still in syndication and that we’re on every day somewhere in the world, all over the world, the show exists in the form that we took such care in presenting so we don’t see really a need or a desire to do a reboot,” he said. “I just feel like it has to be right. We cared very much about the quality of the show and we even ended the show when CBS still wanted us to continue but we ended it on our terms, we ended it after nine seasons. In fact, we did a shortened ninth season, we only did 16 episodes because we felt that was the number of good stories that we could generate at the end.
“I’m a student of TV. I love TV. I love great sitcoms, great dramas, I love everything,” Rosenthal continued. “But I’ve also seen, especially in sitcoms, some shows stay beyond when they should have, and that hurts their legacy. Maybe we wouldn’t be on 30 years later if we had done more shows than we should have.”
The Robert & Amy Spinoff
While a reboot has been a hard no, a spinoff is a different matter. Rosenthal attempted one centered on Ray’s cop brother Robert (Garrett) and his wife Amy (Monica Horan).
“We had a spinoff ready right after Raymond went off the air, and the reason that I wanted to do this spinoff was to keep the writers together, but to do a different show with Amy’s parents who we loved, Fred Willard and Georgia Engel, and her brother, who we loved, Chris Elliot and, of course, Monica and Brad,” Rosenthal said. “We thought we could use some of the characters and send them into a different world, in a different setting, but CBS didn’t want it.”
No more sitcoms
Everybody Loves Raymond has been Romano’s first and only multi-camera comedy to date. (He had famously been cast in another network sitcom, NewsRadio, six months prior but was fired on the second day of rehearsal and replaced with Joe Rogan.)
Since then, Romano has done dramas/dramedies and single-camera comedies, including Parenthood, Men of a Certain Age, Get Shorty and No Good Deed. He recently joined the upcoming second season of Netflix’s single-camera half-hour Running Point starring Kate Hudson.
Would he consider doing multi-cam comedy again?
“I really wouldn’t,” Romano said. “I don’t know that I would ever want to do a sitcom again, but if it’s the right single-camera [I would]. I’ve done single-camera, one-hour shows that are kind of comedic, but also drama; I’m doing one now, Running Point, which is a half-hour comedy but it’s got some nice, dramatic moments in it. But no, I wouldn’t want to try to repeat. My four-camera legacy, I don’t want to damage it, I want to leave it the way it is.”
He then added to his answer. “Although I will say I do miss the live audience, there’s an energy with the live audience that you could never duplicate again. Every week, to be up there in front of this live audience and get the energy in, I miss that part. I miss it all but I do miss that now when I think of never doing another one, I’m like, Oh, I’m gonna miss that.”
Like Romano, Rosenthal, who had worked as a writer on a handful of sitcoms prior to Everybody Loves Raymond, has not done a multi-camera comedy series since the end of the show in 2005. In fact, Rosenthal has not done any scripted series in the past 20 years after a couple of comedy pilots post-Raymond did not go to series. He is known for his food-themed Netflix reality series Somebody Feed Phil, which has released eight seasons to date.
Was being back on the Raymond set for the reunion give him the itch to try sitcoms again?
“The itch has never left. I’ve always loved the four-camera sitcom. That’s where I feel like I can work because that’s the genre that I’m fond of, and the genre I know,” Rosenthal said. “They don’t do too many of these anymore. They told me when Raymond was finished that the business had changed in the nine years we were doing Raymond. So after a couple of years of not being able to get another sitcom on, I shifted gears, and that’s why we have Somebody Feed Phil. I would be open to doing another sitcom, but I also am never going to quit Somebody Feed Phil. I’m gonna find a way to do that the rest of my life, if they’ll have me.”
More reunions
It took 29 years after the end of Everybody Loves Raymond to make the first reunion happen but it may not take as long for the second.
“In 5-10 years, if we’re all still around, sure, why not revisit some of the things,” Rosenthal said of the prospect of doing another special. “I’m fine if people want to see that. It’s very easy for us to do because we love doing it. We love being together.”
Everybody Loves Raymond: 30th Anniversary Reunion airs Nov. 24 from 8 to 9:30 p.m. on CBS and streaming on Paramount+.
Hosted by Romano and Rosenthal, the special features appearances by cast members Garrett, Heaton, Horan, Madylin Sweeten and Sullivan Sweeten. It also pays tribute to Roberts, Boyle, and Sawyer Sweeten. You can see more photos from the reunion here.