In honor of the 30th anniversary of Everybody Loves Raymond next year, series creator Philip Rosenthal shared that he wants to have the cast come together for a reunion show that looks back on the hit sitcom. The series originally ran on CBS from 1996 to 2005 and starred Ray Romano as sports writer Ray Barone. The series focused on Ray’s life with his wife Debra (Patricia Heaton), as well as his parents and brother, who lived across the street from them.
While speaking with NME, Rosenthal said that now would be a good time for the cast to reunite since 2025 will mark the 20th anniversary of the series’ ending. He also pointed out that in 2026, it will have been 30 years since the sitcom premiered. The creator said what he wanted to do would be similar to Friends: The Reunion, which had the cast come together to talk about the show instead of continuing the story. Rosenthal also shared that he is talking to production companies about a potential reunion.
“This year we’ve been off the air for 20 years. It’s a good time to do a reunion special, the way Friends did a reunion special [in 2021]. It wasn’t a reboot of Friends. It was: here they are now – talking about what it was like then… We can do that next year when we’ll have premiered 30 years ago. We’re talking to production companies right now. We want to do it.“
For the special, Rosenthal says that he would like to talk about how they thought up ideas for episodes, especially since most of them came from personal experiences.
“We’ll all have fun stories because that’s where all the material for Raymond came from – from stuff that happened to us. If you worked for me, your job was to go home, get in a fight with your wife and come back in and tell me about it…“
Rosenthal also explains why a revival of Everybody Loves Raymond would not be a good idea. One of the reasons is that since so much time has passed, some of the show’s most important cast members have passed away. This would make it so that a revival wouldn’t feel the same as the original show, and it could hurt its overall legacy. Rosenthal’s thoughts on a continuation can be found below:
“Time has passed. People have passed away, so a reboot isn’t going to feel the same. It never does. There’s so much money to be had if you keep going. We felt like we had enough money. We’d all done well enough to live comfortably. Why keep going? We’re gonna actually hurt the legacy of the show.“
What A Reunion Show Would Mean For Everybody Loves Raymond
A Fun Way To Celebrate The Beloved Sitcom
The Everybody Loves Raymond cast having a reunion special would be a fun way to celebrate the show’s legacy. Along with Friends, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air also had a similar reunion show, which was released in 2020. Outside of television specials, having sitcom stars revisit their shows has become popular for podcasts. Some of these podcasts include Pod Meets World, which looks back at Boy Meets World, and Office Ladies, which looks back at The Office.
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Everybody Loves Raymond: One Quote From Each Character That Perfectly Sums Up Their Personality
Everybody Loves Raymond has a core of characters that have different personalities and arcs that can be summed up by their most iconic quotes.
The main star, Ramona, has been consistently against the revival idea, bringing up the point that many cast members have since died. Since the show ended, Peter Boyle and Doris Roberts, who played Ray’s parents, Frank and Marie, have passed away. Sawyer Sweeten, who played one of Ray’s sons, also passed away after the series concluded. Since Rosenthal also doesn’t want to do a revival of the show, this reunion show would also give them a chance to pay tribute to those performers. Furthermore, this may be the ideal choice, given that several recent revivals, like Frasier and iCarly, were axed after a few seasons.
Our Take On An Everybody Loves Raymond Reunion Show
The Proper Way To Bring The Cast Back Together
Even though it would be fun to see what Ray and Debra Barone have been up to the past 20 years, Rosenthal is right that it wouldn’t feel the same without the entire cast. So much of the show was about Ray having to deal with his parents constantly coming over to his house and being so involved in his life. Without them, it would lose one of the core parts of what made that sitcom so special, and it would feel like a different show.
The special talking about where the ideas for the episodes came from could be better since the audience would now be in on what had been an inside joke. The DVDs of Seinfeld had short BTS features about certain segments that make the episodes funnier when rewatching. Everybody Loves Raymond would especially benefit from this approach since part of what made it so special was how grounded and relatable a sitcom it was.
Source: NME
Everybody Loves Raymond
8/10
- Release Date
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1996 – 2004
- Showrunner
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Phil Rosenthal
