As promised in our newsletter, here's TV writer and "Ten Minutes to the Pitch" author Chris Abbott's essay in honor of "Everybody Loves Raymond," which goes off the air this year. We'll miss you, Ray, Robert, Debra, Amy, Frank and Marie!
I am a dedicated “Raymond” groupie. I watch the new episodes. I watch the old episodes. I’ve been known to watch the same syndicated episode three times in one day. My husband thinks I’m insane. I’m not. I’m disciplined.
So you can imagine my embarrassment and shock when I discovered I had almost forgotten to tune in to the last episode. How could this have happened? Early senility? Fear of abandonment? As I wrestled with the remote control and the VCR, it came to me: I was mentally stuck in vacation planning hell, which had caused all other memory functions to shut down.
It started like this: my husband offered to take my aging parents on a two week car trip through the Pacific Northwest and the Rocky Mountain States. He had thrown me and our fourteen year old son into the offer for good measure. My parents were so delighted at the prospect, I didn’t have the heart to remind them that we can’t get along on a five minute trip to Church, much less a two week trip to Oregon and back.
Anyone who has ever tried to plan a trip with elderly, handicapped parents and a bona fide teenager will recognize the progression of emotions we went through as we hammered out the itinerary: enthusiasm, confusion, irritation, fault-finding, irrational, emotional outbursts, ultimatums, character assassination, and finally the complete and utter disintegration of the communication process. In other words, a perfect episode of “Everybody Loves Raymond.”
Working the remote control and the VCR and I still had enough brainpower to figure out why I had almost forgotten to watch the show and the reason it has been so popular! Multitasking. It’s what makes me and Debra superior to our husbands. The reason we all like “Everybody Loves Raymond” so much is that the characters are just like us.
Wait a minute. That’s not it. It’s close. Wait. Here it is: it’s not because the characters are so much like us. It’s because they’re not so much like us. No, seriously, this makes sense. See, if the Barone family were planning a trip – oh, say to Italy– they would be at each other’s throats the same way my family and I were over this ridiculous trip to Astoria. But they would have snappy lines written for them by Ray Romano and Philip Rosenthal.
That’s right. They would be funny. They might have the same problems we do, but they are funnier and smarter than we are and you know they’re still going to be together next Monday night. Which is more than I can guarantee of my family at any given moment. That’s why we like the show. It’s a better version of us.
Personally, I would kill to have Romano and Rosenthal write my life. It’s not that I can’t think of great come backs on my own; but it usually takes me two and a half days and by then the moment has pretty much passed. And, you know, they’re used to writing about my family. The characters in their series, like people everywhere, are selfish, childish, petty, lazy, inconsiderate and sometimes even downright mean. But, unlike the characters of most other sitcoms, they’re never silly.
Yeah, I’ve got that part figured out, too. It’s because they call each other on their bullshit. I’m sorry, there’s no other word for it. Not one of the characters on “Raymond” gets away with anything for long. Even sentimentality is dispatched with in a hurry. And by the end of the episode, the Barones may all still be fighting, but we know, really, that they’re okay.
We don’t get that in real life. The learning process is much messier, much slower, not nearly as funny and sometimes it even stalls out and dies. We want to be better human beings than we are, but we don’t have Ray and Phil working for us in the writers’ room.
My family will get through our two week trip. And later we’ll talk about it as if we even enjoyed it. And when fall rolls around, we’ll look forward to the one thing we all love doing together on Monday nights – and then we’ll remember: no more “Raymond.” Oh, sure, we can watch the syndicated episodes. But it won’t be the same.
I’ll miss you, “Raymond.” I learned more about family and love in a single episode of your series than I did from a whole year of “Dr. Phil.” I wish you all the best – and a long-deserved rest. But after that, if you decide you’d like to take a whack at my life, you should know that I’m pretty darned good at that slapstick stuff. So bring it on!
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