The television industry’s reboot/remake/revival craze can’t touch Everybody Loves Raymond, according to Brad Garrett, who played Ray Romano’s onscreen brother on the hit CBS sitcom.
At the Los Angeles premiere of the Pixar film Elio last week, Garrett told People there “won’t be” a Raymond revival.
“And I’m just saying that because that’s something that Ray and [creator] Phil [Rosenthal] have always said,” he added.
According to Garrett, a reboot wouldn’t work without cast members Peter Boyle, who died in 2006, and Doris Roberts, who died nearly a decade later. The two actors played Frank and Marie Barone — parents of Raymond and Garrett’s Robert Barone — who lived with Robert across the street from Raymond and wife Debra (Patricia Heaton).
“There is no show without the parents,” Garrett said. “They were the catalyst, and to do anything that would resemble that wouldn’t be right to the audiences or to the loyal fanbase. And it was about those two families, and you can’t get around that.”
Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Disney/Pixar
All of that said, Garrett told the magazine he was “very grateful” for Everybody Loves Raymond, for which he won three Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series Emmys across four years. And he’s been revisiting the show through streaming, where Raymond is currently available on Paramount+ and Peacock.
“They took on a new look to me,” he said of the show’s 210 episodes, which originally aired on CBS between 1996 and 2005. “I was appreciating them more. I was very hard on them back then … But, you see, when you’re removed from it a little, I felt like an audience member. And then I said, ‘Let me rate them.’ I rated them, and I was hard on some.”
As Garrett mentioned, both Rosenthal and Romano have expressed reluctance regarding the prospect of a Raymond reboot.
“We don’t even get two words out of that question out of our mouths before we say no, because we’re missing key ingredients,” Rosenthal told the Daily News in 2020. “There is no show without [Boyle and Roberts]. We could do something different, but it wouldn’t be Everybody Loves Raymond.”
Rosenthal also said that CBS, viewers, and even family members wanted the show’s cast, crew, and creatives to continue past nine seasons. “But we knew we had run the course,” he explained. “And we also knew that we were out of stories after nine years. And we wanted to stop before we became lousy.”
As for Raymond himself, Romano told Yahoo! Entertainment in December he wouldn’t want to see the sitcom rebooted. “I’m just a little protective of Everybody Loves Raymond, just because it was very personal to me.”
Everybody Loves Raymond, Seasons 1–9 Now Streaming, Paramount+ & Peacock
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