Merciful Brad Garrett swears we'll be spared an Everybody Loves Raymond revival

"There is no show without the parents," Garrett said unequivocally, when asked about a revival while promoting his new Pixar movie Elio.

Merciful Brad Garrett swears we'll be spared an Everybody Loves Raymond revival
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In a world where literally anything that made anyone any money ever is considered fair game to be fed into the ever-hungry maw of the Reboot Industrial Complex, we’d like to take a moment to formally thank Brad Garrett. The veteran comedy actor was walking the red carpet for the premiere of his new Pixar movie, Elio, when someone—moved, we assume, by the spirit of Satan, who is the devil—went ahead and asked him when he was going to get around to bringing back Everybody Loves Raymond, the sitcom that transformed him into a household name. (And was, almost uniformly, better, smarter, and funnier than the imitators that followed in its wake.) After all, that same voice of sin in our own brains cackles, we just passed the 20-year anniversary of the series going off the air. Isn’t it time to drag it, screaming, back in front of the masses? Maybe hire some young adults born years after the series first started airing to play Ray and Roberts’ kids, now being annoyed by their own living-too-close parents? (It genuinely sucks how easy this stuff has become to generate, solely due to years of training by the assembled forces of TV.)

But Garrett, to his genuine credit, shot the whole idea down immediately—noting that he, Ray Romano, and series creator Phil Rosenthal have discussed the idea at least in passing, and concluded that it was simply impossible to do Raymond without Peter Boyle and Doris Roberts, who died in 2006 and 2016, respectively. “There is no show without the parents,” asserted Garrett, echoing sentiments Romano expressed back in 2023. “They were the catalyst, and to do anything that would resemble that wouldn’t be right to the audiences or the loyal fan base. And it was about those two families, and you can’t get around that.”

To be fair, everybody involved in the series seems to be appearing on TV pretty steadily, so it’s not like any of them are hurting for work. (Romano, Garrett, and Patricia Heaton still regularly star in things, and Rosenthal has, bizarrely, become an insanely successful food show host thanks to Somebody Feed Phil.) And so the gods of TV have decreed we will be spared this particular indignity. Thanks, Brad. It’s a genuine load off our minds in troubled times.

[via Variety]

 

 
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