Ray Romano has no interest in rebooting his sitcom
He seems to think it would be impossible after the loss of both of his TV parents
Aux News Ray Romano
Everyone’s going wild for the new Frasier, which is apparently actually good and not just some kind of weird meme joke or inexplicable fanservice to an audience that we can’t believe exists, but one classic sitcom star isn’t sufficiently impressed by the new-ish wave of rebooting old TV shows to fill desperate TV networks’ increasingly barren schedules with something—anything—with some built-in appeal. Appearing on Real Time With Bill Maher (via Variety), Ray Romano effectively shot down any chance at a reboot or a revival of Everybody Loves Raymond.
Romano had a couple of good reasons for this, also: For one, he says these reboots are “never as good” as the originals, and he doesn’t want to tarnish the “legacy” of his show. Also, 40 percent of the original show’s core cast is dead, with Romano indicating that you simply can’t do the show without them: “It’s now out of the question,” he told Bill Maher, “because unfortunately the parents are gone: Peter Boyle and Doris Roberts.”
Everybody Loves Raymond ran from 1996 to 2005 and starred Romano as a sportswriter living with his wife (Patricia Heaton) across the street from his overbearing Italian-American parents (Boyle, who died in 2006, and Roberts, who died in 2016), plus his brother Robert (Brad Garrett, who is still with us). No offense to the deceased, but it would be possible to do a version of the show without Raymond’s parents—him and Debra moved somewhere else just like Frasier, boom, you’re done—but he’s probably right that it wouldn’t be as good. Nobody was tuning in to that show to see Raymond not get into dramatic Oedipal arguments with his mother while his father sat in a recliner and shouted at them. Oh, you were really invested in Raymond’s career as a sportswriter? As if you would’ve even remember that part of it without us telling you.
So yeah, it’s not happening. But still, Nobody Loves Robert, a spin-off about Brad Garrett’s character that we just invented, could still happen.
69 Comments
Just go a different direction entirely: Everybody Hunts Raymond
Spoiler: Ice-T cameos in the season 1 finale.
I’m sure there already is the porn parody Everybody Fucks Raymond.
*checks*Apparently… not?
Or a retelling of ‘A Christmas Carol’ starring the title character, ‘Everybody Haunts Raymond’.
Romano’s also had significant success in roles outside of Raymond. He had meaningful roles in both The Big Sick and The Irishman, for example. That’s pretty impressive for a guy who, like Jerry Seinfeld in Seinfeld, was brought into Raymond because of his comedic sensibilities, not his acting.Also, I wasn’t much of a Raymond viewer, but unless I missed something, I’m not sure the fights between Romano and his mother were “Oedipal.” What does Barsanti think Romano’s character wanted to do to Roberts?
(bitterly, through clenched teeth) Nine seasons and they never paid off Ray’s Oedipal complex.
It would put the title in a different light. I thought most characters on the show were supposed to love Raymond in a familial way.
Username checks out.
I’m not sure the fights between Romano and his mother were “Oedipal.” What does Barsanti think Romano’s character wanted to do to Roberts?He’s fairly dim, so I’m not sure Barsanti understands what “Oedipal” actually means.
The only project of his that could have used a continuation stopped being a possibility this week :’(
“Enjoy, ya sick bastard!”
It was a solid show. Chris Elliot was on for a bit. There is one where the mother makes a sculpture that the church refuses that is out of control.
Romano has turned into a pretty reliable dramatic actor. I like ELR but I’m much more interested in seeing him do something different.
I enjoyed him in Parenthood (TV show version) and in Men of a Certain Age (with the late great Andre Braugher), both sort of dramedy-ish.
He was fantastic on the TV run of Parenthood, playing an ex of Lauren Graham’s who is likely on the autism spectrum and becomes a sort of mentor to Krause and Potter’s more severely autistic son. Very quiet, heartfelt performance.
Yeah, they flogged the “will they, won’t they” trope with Ray and Doris so hard.After a couple seasons I lost interest in whether they’d snog or not.
I’m going to miss these thoughtful, introspective discussions when AV Club shuts down abruptly overnight sometime early next year and flips to a Latin music radio station format.
I saw they finally pulled the corpse of Jezabel off the site last week. No comments on Root…unless AV Club pulls more clicks than those sites I can’t imagine it’s much longer for this world.
My understanding is that they cut off comments for those sites because they’d reached twitter levels of nasty, and without comments the sites died.As long as this site maintains the genteel thoughtfulness of this thread, AVClub should be fine.
He was so good in The Big Sick Irishman
Everybody Loves Raymond, The Big Sick Irishman
I’m Waiting For The Big Sick Irishman
Not to mention the obvious parody /homage to him in The Venture Btos, Henchman 24.
The season finale literally had his mom crawl into bed with him…
Everyone should watch Ray Romano in The Grand and Funny People. In other words, everyone should feel as disappointed as I am that he wasted all that time making a ton of money on a mediocre show. Although, he also got to spend those years hanging with Peter Boyle AND make a ton of money. He made the right choice but fuck is he hilarious in every comedic role that isn’t Everyone Loves Raymond.
“him and Debra”Two errors in one three-word sentence fragment, and you’re surprised he doesn’t know what Oedipal means?
Few TV characters have had a more Oedipal attachment to their mother than Ray. Well into adulthood (and long after he married), Ray was still latched onto his mother, Marie, for comfort and approval (which his mother regularly provided or withheld in a weaponized way). At the same time, Ray’s mother was inappropriately threatened by *Ray Romano voice* Debra, who served to replace her in many of those emotional roles. (Oedipal isn’t always about literal sexual desire.) I’d say the only element that wasn’t very Oedipal was that Ray had no correlating hatred of his Father, Frank, which is typically found in such dysfunctional dynamics.
I kinda thought that he was playing a older version of Raymond in the first few minutes of the new show Bookie.
Good instincts on Ray’s part. I liked the show, but even in its prime it was wearing a bit thin. It was never nearly as deep a show as Frasier (not necessarily a criticism) so there just isn’t as much you could do with it. It’s an archetypal family sitcom and it knows it.Also what’s up with the weird running… joke? …on this site, where every article about the Frasier reboot mentions that “it’s apparently actually pretty good, maybe we should watch it” even though that’s exactly the kind of thing this site would normally cover? Feel like I missed something.
It was exactly the kind of thing AV Club would cover. The beloved pop culture website you loved is dead, now only haunted by us in the greys.
I don’t usually bother complaining about what the AVClub’s become because it’s not gonna change anything. I still like coming here on occasion because you get a summary of pop culture news I otherwise wouldn’t see and the comments are usually good but…I started coming here probably a decade or so ago (before gizmodo anyway) because I was watching a show (which one, I forget) but I wanted to discuss it further, or read further discussion of it. I find this site and it’s got a review of the episode I just watched, and just about every single other thing I was watching. Not only that but the reviews are good and thoughtful, and the comments just as much so.
From that point on I’d watch episodes of new shows in the evening and read all the reviews (and comments) the day after. It was amazing stuff and yeah, there was snark, but it was mostly consistent and well done. Now the snark’s just tonally inconsistent and weird, the reviews are all but disappeared, the comments are a fraction of what they were, and the long form articles are gone. I just don’t really understand what the point of this place is anymore. Gizmodo for some reason saw fit to buy this site, and others, to do what? To shutter Splinter and Jezebel, disable comments on Deadspin, and turn the AVClub into a half arsed shell of the worst possible version of itself?
The day that the old AVClub died for me was when one of the hackier writers described Lawrence of Arabia as a “grandpa white savior movie”. Umm… did you actually watch that movie all the way through?
I see G/O articles all the time on my browser’s splash page when it opens, so I can only assume that using the sites as clickbait to drive ad sales has proven more profitable than actually running content-centric pages staffed by knowledgeable writers.
I can basically countersign all of this. Why couldn’t Gawker have just died, instead of its rotting corpse being down to this site, gradually killing it? Gawker got what it deserved in the whole Hulk Hogan/Peter Theil saga; the fact that they outed a fascist doesn’t make outing that person okay, you hypocritical fucks.
AVClub never watch shows or movies anymore. They just hire writer or use AI to copy paste Deadline articles. They sometime forget that this site had a review before.
I’m laughing that this article sourced the content of the interview from Variety, when the freaking interview itself is right there on Real Time. Can’t even be bothered to watch it firsthand??
Nope; Bill Maher is now a deplorable, and also the children who work here think he’s old and smells weird.
Right? The whole “Frasier, a show people apparently and baffingly liked at some point” angle is curious to me, and more indicative of writers who maybe shouldn’t be covering pop culture as a career.
“writers who maybe shouldn’t be covering pop culture as a career.”- The A.V Club
“Writers who maybe shouldn’t be.”There, I fixed it.
It’s what passes for snark around here, snark that’s been filtered through an SEO, appeal-to-all-the-demographics schtick.If you want to watch Frasier Redux, great! If you don’t want to watch Frasier Redux, that “haha, maybe we should watch it” can be shittily played off as irony.
One of the twins killed himself, too. Good luck getting people to not think of that.
That was my thought as well. RIP Mr. Sweeten.
Yes, and not only that, but the new show would have to address his absence, which would either a) consistently remind his siblings/family (common knowledge, mostly, but they were all real siblings [twins, obviously, but the sister as well]), or b) recast them, and constantly remind his siblings/family of that loss through watching/hearing about the show. The risk/reward of that is not worth it alone, even if just for personal reasons, let alone what Ray mentioned. He strikes me as a very smart guy, and he made the right call.
I have to think that would make just being on set very difficult for Romano, Heaton and Garrett. Can’t imagine them falling right into a new pair of actors.
Appearing on Real Time With Bill Maher
Evidently Ted Cruz wasn’t available this week.
They went the human route instead.
Cruz has just moulted, and his new dermis hasn’t fully solidified yet.
I mean. . . Raymond and Debra could be “the parents.” Focus the show on their kids and the new grandchildren.
What about the twin who killed himself?
He sure wasn’t “twin it to win it”.Ohhh I’m a terrible person.
Yyeah, I don’t have any real connection to this show, but that seems to be the obvious route to take
I can’t believe that I’m sitting here in TYOOL 2023 thinking “damn, I have respect for Ray Romano” but here we are.
To be fair, who knows if a reboot is even a real possibility. All we know for sure is that he isn’t actively trying to make a bad choice.
P.S. He doesn’t need the money, he’s very successful being a standup, he still has his first wife, unlike Kelsey Grammer who’s on #4.
You didn’t just invent the Robert spin-off, it was considered. One late-run episode which focused on Robert and his weird wife put an end to that idea, though.
Garrett was used in just about the right proportions on the original show. I would not want to follow him around all day, though.
I wish he’d reboot Get Shorty, because that was a fantastic show and he was great in it.
This site is so weird lately. Everyone’s going wild for the new Frasier? Not really—I’ve seen more “this is pretty good but not great” reactions than anything else. And as for that crack about you not believing an audience for it exists—why? The original show was a huge hit, and very acclaimed, not that long ago. Quite a lot of the people that liked it are still alive.
I know my parents still watch it.
When you realize the “writers” here are about the age the children on the show would be now, it all makes more sense.
A 90s sitcom star said nothing of interest. AVClub is on the case!
Isn’t “Debra” like, full blown MAGA now? Can’t see wanting to spend time with that.
I haven’t heard anything about her since The Middle, but she said some stupid anti-abortion/anti-birth control stuff back then.
Reboot Joey, you cowards.