The episode of “Everybody Loves Raymond” I remember most is “No Fat,” from the third season. Marie (Doris Roberts) wants the Barone family to eat healthier, so she makes a tofu turkey for Thanksgiving, leading to an extraordinary display of verbal and physical comedy as the family contends with the “bean curd bird.”
Frank (Peter Boyle) asks for the carving knife. Why? So he can slit his throat. Robert (Brad Garrett) says he didn’t bring his dog, because even he wouldn’t eat such a centerpiece. Raymond (Ray Romano) doesn’t miss a beat: “Yeah, but we could eat him.” After Raymond finally tries the tofu, he quips, “Kind of starts out with an aftertaste, doesn’t it?”
Scenes like this are ingrained in my head because I used to watch the show with my mother every night. It was one of the few things we did together.
Created by Phil Rosenthal, “Everybody Loves Raymond” ran on CBS from 1996-2005 and won 15 Emmys. (It currently streams on Paramount+ and Peacock.) It centers on the Long Island suburban family of Raymond, a sportswriter whose parents live across the street, and Debra (Patricia Heaton), who does not like her ever-present in-laws. Ray’s older brother, Robert, is a police officer who believes Ray gets all the attention, leading to the title.
On Monday, CBS will air a special celebrating the show’s 30th anniversary — just in time for Thanksgiving. It will feature interviews with the cast and previously unreleased outtakes. (It will also stream on Paramount+.)
The 1980s and ’90s were a heyday for family sitcoms, and “Raymond” fit comfortably within the format. But the Barones’ dysfunction made it stand out among contemporaries like “Home Improvement,” “Family Matters” and “Full House.” (In 1996, The Los Angeles Times described it as “sort of a ‘Seinfeld’ with kids.”)
Romano was a standup comedian and former furniture deliveryman with minimal television experience, and the characters were based on people from his life. It wasn’t rare for them to veer into cruelty — Ray once translates Debra’s beef braciole as “Italian for roadkill” — and their flaws were never far from the surface.
Ray may be a loving husband and a father, but he was also narcissistic. Robert’s resentments, as the less celebrated son, constantly color his interactions with his family. Frank and Marie swivel from doting to cutting in a way that explains Ray and Robert. And poor Debra has to put up with all of this.
They may all be loving, but in their individual roles as parents, brothers, husbands and wives, there is much room for improvement.
My mother and I found solace in the broad comedy of the show, which at a glance seemed like an odd fit for us. My mother is Bengali and emigrated from India in the 1960s, while I was born in Massachusetts. But few things are as universal as familial bickering, and the Barones offered an example that was recognizable, realistic and, to a point, aspirational.
There was a vast cultural and generational gap between my parents and me. They didn’t understand their son’s love of, say, a ludicrous art form like professional wrestling. I didn’t understand why they were laser-focused on academic achievement at the expense of everything else. (Not an uncommon dynamic among immigrant families.)
We lived in the New Jersey suburbs, not terribly far from Long Island, but there wasn’t much in “Raymond” that was obviously relatable to us. Of course there wasn’t much anywhere on TV that was relatable to us: South Asian-American families were virtually absent onscreen then and, with some exceptions, they still are.
But the resonance of the sitcom wasn’t in seeing ourselves; it was in seeing what we wanted ourselves to be and also latching on to the parts that did apply. The reason “Raymond” became appointment viewing for us was because beneath the surface, the characters’ needs were things we needed, too.
Robert, often relegated to second fiddle behind Raymond, craved more affection from his parents. In our household and the Indian ones my parents grew up in, parental warmth was a scarce commodity. Ray was occasionally selfish but mostly wanted everyone to get along at the end of the day. I was the same on both counts. Debra wanted her meddlesome in-laws to give them more space. My parents’ marriage was arranged by my maternal grandmother — my mother understood Debra’s need for independence more than she realized.
In one episode, Ray observes his parents sharing a meal in silence and has a revelation: Marie and Frank don’t need to talk to each other to be a functional family. Their silence was borne of comfort, not distance. I looked at my mother and wondered if there was a world where that could be true for us.
Dinners were silent for the most part growing up, and eventually my mother and I moved our meals in front of the television to watch “Raymond,” eating curries with our hands every night. It seemed like an admission of defeat for our family, an abandoning of even the pretense of unity. (My older brother had long ago moved out and my father didn’t watch television. My parents divorced not long after.) But we didn’t mind.
When I called my mother to tell her I was writing about the show, she was delighted and immediately rattled off her favorite scenes without prompting. In Bengali, she re-enacted the Season 7 episode in which Ray and Debra argue over who will put away a suitcase with cheese in it, culminating in an over-the-top argument on the stairs.
She said she loved that it was “a family show that everyone could watch together.” But something else stuck with her: That the Barone family lived so close to one another reminded her of her childhood.
“The environment was a lot like India,” she said. “That’s why I liked it.” (She recalled that when we used to visit her brother in Toronto, our entire family would sleep on the floor in their cramped apartment.)
I valued it because while TV was full of happy families, the Barones seemed more attainable. I wrote my college essay about how I wanted to be like Ray when I grew up. Not just because I wanted to be a sportswriter at the time, but because I craved his life: Surrounded by loving, flawed relatives who always stick together, whatever their conflicts and difficulties.
The characters on “Everybody Loves Raymond” weren’t always likable, but few of us are. I was grateful that my mother and I could watch a show that gave us a road map for how to keep flawed people together, despite lots of reasons to be apart.
The tofu turkey scene still holds up, and I’m still grateful to the Barones. My mother and I rarely laughed in each other’s presence. That is, unless Marie and Frank were over at Ray and Debra’s, while our turmeric-stained hands shoved rice into our mouths.
Sopan Deb is a Times reporter covering breaking news and culture.
The post How ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ Brought My Mother and Me Closer appeared first on New York Times.
