The cast and creator of Everybody Loves Raymond reunited in a CBS special Monday, and while there were certainly some physical indications of the passage of time — Madylin and Sullivan Sweeten, who played two of the three kids on the show, are in their 30s now —it was otherwise as if they picked up right where they left off.
In front of a live audience and on a set re-creating the Barone family’s living room and kitchen —and with a suitcase still on the staircase landing —series creator Phil Rosenthal and star Ray Romano reminisced with co-stars Patricia Heaton, Brad Garrett, Monica Horan (she and Rosenthal are married in real life) and Madilyn and Sullivan Sweeten. (CBS billed the reunion as a 30th anniversary, but it’s a little early: Everybody Loves Raymond premiered in September 1996.)
The cast and Rosenthal also paid tribute to their late co-stars Peter Boyle, Doris Roberts and Sawyer Sweeten, showed outtakes and reminisced about their nine years on the Emmy-winning series. Here are some of the best moments from the 90-minute special.
Raymond is global: The series has aired around the world in syndication and spawned a number of local remakes (including one in Russia, the subject of Rosenthal’s 2010 documentary Exporting Raymond. A woman in the audience told Romano that she watched the show growing up in the Philippines and that it helped her learn English.
Upon hearing that, Rosenthal asked, “You learned how to speak English from Ray Romano? So were your first English words ‘Ohhh noooo!’?”
There will be no sequels: Just a few minutes into the show, Romano laid out the terms of the special: “Let’s get one thing out of the way —this is a reunion.”
“Not a reboot,” Rosenthal added.
“We’re never going to do one, because we’re missing three castmembers, three family members,” Romano continued, as photos of Boyle, Roberts and Sawyer Sweeten showed on screen. “We’d never try to do the show without them.”
“It wouldn’t be the same,” Rosenthal agreed. “We have too much respect for the show itself and for the beautiful audience. … And thankfully, the show is still on every day, all over the world.”
The origin story: Romano asked Rosenthal how they met, to which he replied, “I was in bed” —watching Romano do stand-up on The Late Show With David Letterman. Right after that May 1995 appearance on Letterman’s show, as Letterman tells it in a pre-taped clip, his production company, Worldwide Pants, signed Romano to a deal to develop a sitcom. Rosenthal was hired to write it, and the two met at Art’s Deli in the San Fernando Valley to get to know one another.
They hit it off (obviously), and in discussing their lives they discovered not only the premise for the show —which mirrored Romano’s own life —but also that their stories about their parents had a lot in common. That led to Rosenthal’s guiding principle of keeping regular hours with his writers so they could have lives outside the show, and thus bring stories from those lives back into the writers’ room.
“Ninety percent of everything you saw on the show happened to me, or to Ray, or to one of the other writers,” Rosenthal said, noting that the show’s pilot episode story about Ray giving his parents a Fruit of the Month Club gift came from his own life. “What I didn’t realize, and what I learned from us doing that [was], ‘Oh, wait —your parents are all crazy too.’”
Romano’s kids do great impressions of him: It’s hard to convey in print, but go to the nine-minute mark of the special for some good bits from his daughter, Ally, and sons Matthew, Gregory and Joseph.
Everybody’s favorite episodes: Romano said he has a top five list but singled out “Talk to Your Daughter” from season six. He prepares to have The Talk with Ally (Madylin Sweeten), but rather than asking about sex, she has existential questions for which Ray is entirely unprepared.
Heaton’s favorite is season seven’s “Baggage,” one of the more famous episodes in the show’s run. Debra and Ray have a standoff about who will finish taking their suitcase upstairs after a weekend trip, leading to one of the series’ best pieces of physical comedy as they then end up fighting over who will do the task.
Garrett chose “Lucky Suit,” also from season six, in which Robert’s job interview at the FBI goes sideways when the agent in charge reads him a letter that Marie (Roberts) faxed to the bureau explaining she ruined his lucky suit.
For Horan, it’s “Pat’s Secret,” the next-to-last episode of the series in which Amy’s mother, Pat (Georgia Engel), is revealed to be a secret smoker — leading to confessions from several other members of the extended family.
Madylin Sweeten picked another season six episode, “Marie’s Scuplture,” in which Marie crafts a statue that everyone but she notices looks like a vagina. Sullivan Sweeten said his favorite is the series finale, and specifically the final scene where the entire family gathers at Ray and Debra’s kitchen table for the last time.