When “Everybody Loves Raymond” debuted nine years ago, Homer Simpson was television’s Dean of the Dumb Dads. His chief competition back then was Tim Allen on “Home Improvement” whose live-action pratfalls were almost as cartoonish as Homer’s (and who was falling through roofs long before Homer’s stunt during the recent Ray Romano "Simpsons" episode).
1996 was an oddly transitional year in the area of family sitcoms. It was the final year for both “Roseanne” and “Married With Children,” and a vacuum was forming in the sub-category of dysfunctional families. And on new shows, TV's former ideal dad Bill Cosby's new show "Cosby", he was portraying a sourpuss laid-off airplane mechanic, while former ideal son Michael J. Fox was playing a cocky politician on "Spin City." Into this environment was dropped Raymond Barone and his closely-knit-but-poorly-stitched family.
While officially based on “the stand-up comedy of Ray Romano,” the series was equally dependent upon the family relationships of executive producer Phil Rosenthal. One of the first great running jokes on the show, the incident in which Raymond's parents reacted in horror to their membership in the "Fruit of the Month Club" was actually based on an incident between Rosenthal and his parents. And Romano was lucky to have the additional input; in the early episodes it was way too obvious when Ray Barone was channeling Ray Romano’s act — it was like the stand-up scenes in “Seinfeld”, but in a living room with a tougher audience.
“Raymond” used a network of conflict-ridden relationships in enough combinations to prevent over-repetition. Title character Raymond had to deal with Debra, the wife he knew was smarter than he was, his insecure and usually envious brother Robert, his skillfully domineering mother Marie, and father Frank, who somehow was simultaneously distant and obnoxious. Then there was the long antagonistic marriage of Raymond’s parents, and Robert’s relationship with them (with the supposed knowledge that he was never their favorite), and the mother-in-law/daughter-in-law Battle Royale in which the irresistible force of Marie’s manipulativeness met the increasing-immovable object of Debra’s growing confidence.
Ray loves Debra, but...Of the 200-plus episodes of the series, more than one-quarter centered around Ray and Debra’s marriage, starting with Ray’s inability to say “I love you” (a common affliction among men in sitcoms), and highlighted by Ray’s discovery that he had actually taped over their wedding video, forcing him into his biggest symbolic gesture ever, singlehandedly staging a disastrous ceremony to renew their wedding vows.
Most of the stories involving the Barone children were more about the way their parents and grandparents responded to them. First-grader Michael wrote a class assignment about his “Angry Family” that humiliated all the grown-ups. Ray’s attempt to become a disciplinarian resulted in revelations about how often Ray and Robert got away with breaking their own parents’ rules. And when Ray discovered that Debra was making fun of him to the kids, it reflected back on his image of his dad.
For the first six seasons of “Raymond,” the season finale featured an extended flashback (like most sitcom flashbacks, with the cast in comically era-appropriate haircuts) that tried to cast new light on the characters — but the haircuts were usually too distracting. Other revelations about the past had their moments, such as the class reunion where Ray discovered Debra had been one of the cool kids while he wasn’t, and when Debra learned the used car Ray had bought from his parents was his teenage “make-out-mobile.”
Then there were the episodes in which earlier childhood memories were revisited — and usually revised. Among Ray’s discoveries, the baseball his father gave him was not really signed by Mickey Mantle, his parents were close to breaking up when his own health crisis brought them back together, the accident that ruined his father’s record collection wasn’t really his fault, and his father had cared for a pet bunny when Ray and Robert neglected it, but denied it for 40 years to protect his reputation as a tough guy.
Work woes and family funIn the first season, Ray’s sportswriting career resulted in brief and generally irrelevant guest appearances by sports stars including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Tommy Lasorda. But after the second season opened with Raymond embarrassing himself on a sports-talk TV show, his occupation became less and less relevant, and he became a head-of-the-house who never leaves the house (a condition known as “Ozzie Nelson Syndrome”). Stay-at-home mom Debra rarely mentioned her previous work in public relations, and she only took an outside job twice in the series, both times lasting only one episode.
On the other hand, Robert’s life outside the immediate circle of family was the subject of many plotlines. His future wife Amy first appeared midway through the first season, but the couple didn’t tie the knot until the end of season seven. The producers didn’t have to worry much about losing actress Monica Horan to another show; she’s the real-life wife of Phil Rosenthal (which makes her part of the real-life inspiration for Debra). And since Amy’s family has been introduced to the show, they have become central to almost a third of the episodes (easily exceeding the appearances of Debra’s family over all nine seasons — and providing a readily-available cast for the long-rumored “Robert” spin-off).
The episodes in which Ray’s wife Debra and mother Marie were in direct conflict are among the most memorable in the series. From the first Thanksgiving episode, in which Debra tampered with tradition by making fish (setting up Thanksgiving dinner episodes as a tradition), to Marie teaching Debra to make her famous meatballs, their best scenes seemed to happen in the kitchen. On the occasions when Debra chose to confront Marie directly, Ray’s absolutely panicked reaction was always among his most extreme and funniest. Nothing showed more how Robert’s marriage changed the show than when Marie and Debra fought for new bride Amy’s allegiance.
He's no Homer“Everybody Loves Raymond” could be considered a low-impact comedy show.
Unlike Homer Simpson, Raymond never fell down a gorge, got crushed by a lady wrestler or glued his head to anything. The show's most spectacular visual image comes from the episode in which Marie drove her car through the front of Ray’s house (two seasons after Frank, off-screen, ran into Robert’s parked police car). Debra’s strongest visual moment was an accident with a curling iron. Robert had his scenes with a puppet named “Traffic Cop Timmy,” and Frank’s Halloween Frankenstein costume was the most obvious in-joke (Peter Boyle had played the monster in “Young Frankenstein”) for a show that usually avoided them.
“Everybody Loves Raymond” was the first situation comedy to have a declarative sentence for a title since “Father Knows Best,” although co-creators Romano and Rosenthal were haunted by the fear that the audience might mistake its sarcasm for self-aggrandizement. So, in the show's early opening title sequence, in which Raymond's family passed behind him on a conveyor belt, it was repeated every week by brother Robert.
No claim was ever made that Raymond knew best; Romano’s nervousness about his lack of acting experience was integrated into his character. And among a very skilled cast of experienced character actors, in nine years of situation comedy, Ray Romano has earnestly earned his show's title.
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