During the waning days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ray Romano was flipping through Peacock when he stumbled across his old show “Everybody Loves Raymond.” And whaddyuh know, it was pretty good! “I hadn’t seen an episode in 10 years, 15 years,” he says. “And I went, ‘wow!’ I appreciated it more than before.” So Romano did what any self-respecting fan would do: He binged the entire series, all 210 episodes and he ranked each one, on a scale up to 100. “I never gave everything 100 because nothing is perfect, but I did appreciate everybody’s work more now,” he says. “Now that I can take a step back and it feels like a different time. I appreciated the show more, and all the actors and the writers even more.” Talk about perfect timing to pull out that notebook. After years of trying, series creator Phil Rosenthal finally got the show’s living veterans together, on stage at Television City, to reminisce about the hit CBS sitcom, which aired from 1996 to 2005. Romano and Rosenthal host “Everybody Loves Raymond: 30th Anniversary Reunion,” a 90-minute special that airs Monday on CBS (and for some Paramount+ subscribers). The reunion, filmed last month, took place on a soundstage where the Barone family’s living room was recreated for the event. Besides Romano, who played sportswriter and family man Ray Barone on “Everybody Loves Raymond,” series stars also joining in on the special included Patricia Heaton (Debra), Brad Garrett (Robert), Monica Horan (Amy), Madylin Sweeten (Ally) and Sullivan Sweeten (Michael). The special includes a tribute to Doris Roberts and Peter Boyle, who played Ray’s parents Marie and Frank Barone on the show. Fulwell Entertainment, which was behind the special “Friends: The Reunion,” celebrating another landmark 1990s sitcom, is also the producer on “Everybody Loves Raymond: 30th Anniversary Reunion.” So what took so long to get everyone back together? “Ten years ago, I thought, ‘Hey, it’s 20 years. We should do a reunion.’ CBS, not so excited. How about 25 years? ‘Nah, we have other things.’ And then this is a new regime there, and they’re into it,” Rosenthal says. Did this inspire Rosenthal and Romano to consider revisiting the series with a revival or reboot? Hard pass from them both. “We never wanted to do a reboot,” Rosenthal says. “First of all, we can’t because, sadly, we’re missing some people. So it would never be the same. Secondly, I think Ray and I agree that they’re not really ever as good.” In a wide-ranging conversation, Rosenthal and Romano discuss how they can’t believe how much time has passed Romano is now older than Boyle was on the show and Romano also defends his lack of travel (until Rosenthal forced him to go to Italy as part of the show). They also talk about Rosenthal’s new restaurant and so much more. Here’s Variety‘s full chat with Romano and Rosenthal about “Everybody Loves Raymond: 30th Anniversary Reunion.” As I’m getting ready to talk to you guys, I see breaking Ray Romano news, which is exciting. He’s joining the cast of “Running Point” over at Netflix! ROMANO: Yeah, that just happened in the last two weeks. We’re almost done. I’m jamming in my scenes here, and. I shot for a week and a half. It’s great. They’re fun over there. And Phil, we like everything you do as well. I know not to play favorites. ROSENTHAL: That’s very sweet. But Ray has become an incredible actor over the years. I think he was always great, I thought on our show, and then went to another level. He became such a fantastic dramatic actor as well! Now that I’ve been covering this business for 30 years, that puts me a year in front of the start of Raymond. I remember covering the launch of “Everybody Loves Raymond,” and at the time there was that question of, “well, can Ray act?” ROMANO: And the answer was “almost” because I had just gotten fired year before, from another sitcom. Oh, it was “NewsRadio.” We remember. We know the history! ROMANO: Right, so I understand the worry. And actually, when I look at the first season of “Raymond,” I see the evolution. I really do. How often do you go back and watch? Or did you do a refresher binge for the special? ROMANO: I didn’t do it for the special, but I did it around COVID, or maybe a little bit after COVID. I caught one show on Peacock, and I hadn’t seen an episode in 10 years, 15 years. And I went, “wow.” I appreciated it more than before. So I said, You know what? I get into these things, I’m a little OCD. So I started watching every episode in order and rating them. I gave each one a grade from 1 to 100 And I watched. It took me about a month or so, and I watched all 210 episodes again. I never gave everything a 100 because nothing is perfect, but I did appreciate everybody’s work more now. Now that I can take a step back and it feels like a different time. I appreciated the show more, and all the actors and the writers even more. Do you still have this book with all the ratings? ROMANO: It’s just a list of 1 to 100 and I think I put them in groups. Like the ones that were in the 90s and the 80s and 70s. What was the lowest rating? ROMANO: In the 70s. Listen, you’re making 210 episodes. Without fail, any episode that I gave in the 70s is somebody’s favorite episode. That’s just the way I look at it. I’m critiquing myself. It’s that kind of thing. ROSENTHAL: I think I’m very happy with that rating system. I think we always said there was a level that we shouldn’t go below. ROMANO: Yes, so even our worst episode is a good episode. ROSENTHAL: You can live with it. I was gonna say, 70 is still a strong C. If you had gotten into the 60s, you’re getting to the D territory. But this sounds like mostly A’s and B’s. ROMANO: I think Paul Reiser said it once, he goes, “when you’re making 26 episodes a season, and you got to crank them out, six or seven of them you’re going to love. Six or seven you’re not going to love. And the rest are going to be really good episodes.” But we did have our share of episodes that were stellar, you know? And I can’t believe now we’re hitting 30 years. How do you guys feel about that number? It’s hard to believe. ROSENTHAL: Old! ROMANO: Yeah, old. It’s it’s odd, how fast it goes. And yet you guys are still doing such great work and are still right there in the zeitgeist. ROMANO: I really think of time. I gauge it on sometimes the show, and I think, “wow, this birthday coming up for me, I am going to be as old as Peter Boyle, who played my father, was in the seventh season of ‘Raymond.’” That’s where I am now. A lot of people follow the “Wilfred Brimley line,” how old Wilfred Brimley was in “Cocoon” when he had just turned 50 or something like that. ROSENTHAL: People looked older back then. How old were Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton doing “All in the Family”? ROMANO: I remember a while back, I stumbled on “Marty” and I watched the movie. Ernest Borgnine’s mother, who’s trying to get him married, is like, “I want to see him get married. I mean, how much longer? Look at me. I’m a 57 years old!”‘ What? So Ray, you have the “Peter Boyle line” of, “what’s my age in comparison to Peter on the show,” which is pretty wild. Meanwhile, I love seeing the two of you together. For years now, as Phil has gone on book tours and “Somebody Feed Phil” show tours and he always tells the story about taking you to Italy for the first time and breaking you into global travel, global food, et cetera. What it meant to take “the show “Everybody Loves Raymond” to Italy, and what a game changer that was for you. How do you now look back on that and how Phil maybe helped open your world a little bit. ROMANO: In defense of myself, part of my reluctance is, I’m a very neurotic person. I don’t like to fly, I worry about what if I need medicine and all that kind of stuff. But what the beauty of that was, yes, there was truth to me being content. I don’t think I ever needed to fly overseas. Not that I don’t enjoy other people’s cultures and and meeting other people because I will be honest, I really get satisfaction and joy now knowing that this show resonates with people from totally different backgrounds and cultures. It’s a great feeling of thinking that underneath everything, we’re all the same, you know? And when that happened, I hadn’t experienced that. Right after we filmed that episode, my wife, who’s from Sicily, and I visited her parents’ hometown, a little village on a hill and it was life imitating art. It was exactly like the episode we had just filmed. I was eating this pizza. There were goats. There was a farm. There was these people and all this love and affection and everything. I do like meeting people from different parts and having this bond with them, It reassures my faith in humanity. So I’m not this curmudgeon, who’s, you know, misanthropic, to use a big word. ROSENTHAL: Oh, that’s a good word. You even said it right. For the both of you, in your travels, when people bring up “Raymond,” what’s generally their connection? What do they want to talk to you about? What’s the thing that they gravitate toward? ROMANO: One of the biggest things is the mother. Everybody seems to have a mother like that. ROSENTHAL: They say that the biggest compliment, even when we were on originally, that ‘you were listening outside our house last night.’ Because it felt real to them, they related to it. But we didn’t have to listen outside their house, because we were listening inside our house. And it just proves that if you if you’re truthful, and you write the truth of a situation and get very specific about it, it’ll resonate. Even if that person’s experience isn’t exactly yours, the specifics of it are relatable in and of themselves. Tell me more about the special and when the conversation started to come about of, “let’s get everyone who can back together again.” ROSENTHAL: Ten years ago, I thought, “Hey, it’s 20 years. We should do a reunion.” CBS, not so excited. How about 25 years? “Nah, we have other things.” And then this is a new regime there, and they’re into it. By the way, that’s no small thing. I always say you have to get lucky, right? Here we had to get lucky for the right people to be in the right spot at the right time. Otherwise there is no show. You’re dependent on their taste and their needs and the thing. So, we just got lucky with with the new president over there is a fan of the show, Amy. I’m very grateful that they gave us this opportunity because we had a wonderful time filming it, getting to see everybody again. Including the crew and our guest cast. We had a little party after, it was delightful. Couldn’t have been better. What was it like for you, Ray, to walk on the re-creation of the set, and how they did their best to make it like you were stepping back into that world again? ROMANO: You’ll probably see that in the special, because they filmed that. They filmed before we opened it up to the audience. Before they opened the curtain, they took me and Phil out there to show us the set. And was emotional. I think we both got emotional, and they filmed us. Was there anything that you guys heard that surprised you? Maybe from from anyone else on stage, or anything that came up that you maybe learned after 30 years? ROMANO: We talked to the audience a little and I learned that some woman in the Philippines learned to speak English listening to me. ROSENTHAL: Hilarious. Madylin Sweeten, the little girl on the show, said that I gave her a note. I gave lots of notes I don’t remember, but she said it had this profound effect on her. You never know. That’s the thing about going through life, you you have to be careful. You have to know what you say, everything lands on somebody in a way that could affect them, you never know. ROMANO: And she showed a clip of that example that she was giving. She had this outburst of “I hate you” to me. And I think she was doing it a certain way, and you gave her a certain tip. ROSENTHAL: Maybe she said it in a sad way. And I told her, “really give it to him like you really hate him. ‘I hate you!’ like this.” And then she did it, and she realized the power of just changing it up a tiny bit. ROMANO: I saw that clip and forgot about it! ROSENTHAL: I forgot it too. But it’s funny. Thousands and thousands of moments in a nine-year series, and this one little moment meant something to her. That’s profound to me, to hear this. That’s the fun of getting everyone together. During the pandemic, we saw a lot of cast reunions. It’s kind of where we’re at this point in nostalgia, where people really dig these kind of specials. They want to see their old friends get back together. ROSENTHAL: And it’s so much better than a reboot. We never wanted to do a reboot. First of all, we can’t because, sadly, we’re missing some people. So it would never be the same. Secondly, I think Ray and I agree that they’re not really ever as good. It’s hard to pull off a reboot. And, you’re right, without Peter Boyle and Doris Roberts, it just wouldn’t be the same, right? It’d be a different show, the dynamic is 100% different without them. ROSENTHAL: You have two big gears in the machine missing. Unless it’s about the new generation, as the kids get older and have families of their own. ROSENTHAL: It’s never as good. And you can’t help but compare it to the original. Tell me when it’s worked great. ROMANO: New Coke. The New Coke. It sounds like you came away feeling like this was a good experience. ROMANO: It was really emotional and exciting. ROSENTHAL: The best. The lucky streak continues. So Ray, let’s hear your review of Phil’s new restaurant, Max & Helen’s. From zero to 100 in your 100 scale. ROMANO: I mean, if you allow me to never give anything 100, I’m giving it a 99. ROSENTHAL: Wow, Raymond! ROMANO: I’m going on the food. I’m telling you, get there early, because there’s going to be a line, a long line. ROSENTHAL: It’s Nancy Silverton and my son-in-law, Mason Royal. You know, my son-in-law’s the chef de cuisine at the restaurant. He and my daughter got married a week before the “Raymond” reunion. Congratulations. So every everything’s coming up Phil right now. ROSENTHAL: I mean, something bad is gonna happen, knock wood. We didn’t hear what was number one on Ray’s chart, on the number one episode of all time for “Everybody Loves Raymond.” ROMANO: There’s a few. that are tied, and my memory is blanking, but one of them is the episode “Good Girls” [Season 2, Episode 19]. And then “Not So Fast,” the second episode in the ninth season. When Frank and Marie have to come back home? That’s tied. Maybe “She’s the One” [Season 7, Episode 9] where the woman eats the fly. “Everybody Loves Raymond: 30th Anniversary Reunion” airs Monday, Nov. 24 at 8 p. m. ET on CBS and some Paramount+ subscriptions.
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/ray-romano-phil-rosenthal-no-everybody-loves-raymond-reboot-1236590564/
