Even though it’s been three decades since Ray Barone and his hilariously unhinged family first charmed us off the floral couch, the folks behind Everybody Loves Raymond still wouldn’t have done anything differently.
“I don’t think so,” said star Ray Romano, standing with show creator Phil Rosenthal at Austin’s ATX TV Festival this past weekend. (Watch the video above.) “People sometimes wonder why we ended it. I think we both felt the eighth season was it…”
“We stretched it and we really put our heads together to come up with enough episodes for Season 9 and we couldn’t,” echoed the perpetually amiable Rosenthal. “We actually couldn’t come up with enough episodes. So if you notice Season 9 has only 16 episodes because that was as many we thought we could do well.”
That’s when they knew it was time to say goodbye to the Barones. “We didn’t want to cheapen the show,” continued Romano. “We wanted to go out, but we thought we were hitting on all cylinders.”
Matt Sayles
The two, along with the CBS classic’s former writers Tucker Cawley, Aaron Shure, Tom Caltabiano, Steve Skrovan, Mike Royce and Lew Schneider, got together for a riotous reunion panel at the annual “summer camp for TV lovers” event down in Texas, where they bantered and ribbed each other amid a flurry of their favorite clips. Fittingly, notorious foodie Rosenthal — his lively cuisine-travel docuseries Somebody Feed Phil is moving from Netflix to YouTube next year — took the gang to dinner before they took the stage and afterward, he and Romano reflected on what sounds like the greatest Craft Services situation ever. Crabs flown in from Miami, lobster…legendary lunches.
“The army travels on the stomach, right?” smiled Rosenthal. “I thought one of the ways you can show people you care about them, besides treating them nicely, doing good work, giving them respect, paying them a living wage, [is] food. Food makes a family!”
And it was that family vibe that get the sitcom’s scripts so grounded in reality. Admitting during the panel that every storyline was inspired by something that happened to Romano, one of the writers, or himself, Rosenthal laughed afterward that the show began to run out of conflict as they all grew up and got better at being spouses and parents.
“What’s funny, we were just talking about it tonight, [is that] we were writing our lives and we could incorporate our lives into the characters because we’re the same age as the characters,” he explained. “We were going through having little kids and being married, certainly not as long as we’re married now, so there’s a time in that time of life that is fraught. There’s a lot of pressure.”
“We would do things together, too,” added Romano, who got visibly choked up at the end of the event while discussing the connection the cast and creatives continue to share. “We were a group that outside the show we got along, we would go our parties together. [Phil] and I would travel with our families together and we still do. Yeah. Yeah. It’s really nice.”
We can’t speak for everybody, but we love that, Raymond.