EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND ARTICLE

Here is a re-print of an Entertainment Weekly article that appeared in the November 28, 1997 issue. It is about “Everybody Loves Raymond”. In it CSTF alumni Philip Rosenthal is mentioned.

HAVE SACCHARINE FAMILY SITCOMS LEFT A BAD TASTE IN YOUR MOUTH? THE DELICIOUSLY WITTY EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND MAY WELL BE THE TART TREAT YOU'VE BEEN HANKERING FOR.

It's a set packed with enough family values to make a Promise Keeper weep: As a studio audience shuffles in for a taping of his CBS sitcom, Everybody Loves Raymond, star Ray Romano is gently disengaging his real-life kids--Alexandra, 7, and twins Matthew and Gregory, 4--from his shirttails. His real wife, Anna, currently six months pregnant, is preparing for her role as an extra in this episode about Ray's 20th high school reunion. And TV wife Patricia Heaton is pumping breast milk for her 5-month-old son, Joe, in a dressing room backstage. It's such a pro-family environment, even rock & roll wild man Paul Stanley of Kiss (whose wife, Pamela Bowen, guest-stars as one of Ray's classmates) looks housebroken; he sits peaceably in the front row with his curly-haired son, Evan, nestled in his lap.

The Family Matters set is right next door on L.A.'s Warner Bros. lot, but spiritually, Raymond is miles away from such bland kiddie fodder. Romano's sophomore series reigns as TV's most subtly subversive--and consistently brilliant--sitcom. ABC's tapioca Home Improvement and TGIF cringe-athon may have turned "family comedy" into dirty words for intelligent viewers, but Raymond has reinvented the genre in a way no show has since Roseanne.

Each episode starts with a mundane incident straight out of Ozzie & Harriet (e.g., Ray invites his buddies over to watch a fight the same night his wife is hosting a Tupperware party). Yet the show's pinpoint insights into family dynamics have turned it into a kind of suburban psychodrama--only with really funny jokes.

Although Romano and Heaton's Ray and Debra Barone have three tots (played by Madylin, Sullivan, and Sawyer Sweeten), the show is "not really about the kids," as the star pointed out in the opening-credits sequence last season. "Some people say, 'I've never seen a house where the kids aren't around,'" says Romano, 39. "But we did that deliberately. It's so hard to keep a show with children appealing to adults and not be like Full House."

"If you pay attention," explains creator-executive producer Philip Rosenthal, "most of our shows begin with the words 'Well, they finally went down for a nap.' It's not about kids, it's about people who have kids. It's about Ray being caught between the generation under him and the generation on top of him."

The latter is represented by Ray's buttinsky parents (Peter Boyle and Doris Roberts), who live across the street with his obsessive-compulsive cop brother, Robert (Brad Garrett). "I love the dysfunction--every family has its strange quirks," says Garrett. "This is one of the few family shows that isn't about a trip to Sea World."

Of course, Raymond isn't entirely squeaky-clean. "We have a lot of stuff about me not wanting to have sex because I'm too tired," says Heaton. "Maybe I'm giving away too much, but my husband [actor David Hunt] will tell you that's reality."

Reality is a key word on Raymond. At a time when once-realistic sitcoms like Seinfeld are flying off into slapstick surrealism, Romano remains dedicated to grounding his show in everyday minutiae. Observes the characteristically blunt Boyle, "I was watching a lineup of sitcoms, and everybody did something unbelievable and then fell down. That's crap!" Anything deemed too "shticky" is thus banned from Raymond's scripts. "We try to stay away from sitcom-formula jokes," says Romano. "Like a Lenny-Squiggy entrance. Someone says, 'Who would be stupid enough to wear that hat?' and they enter wearing that hat."

Raymond's realism seems eerily precise at times. "My character can be horrifyingly annoying, but people say to me, 'You're just like my mother!'" reports Roberts. Adds Heaton, "My neighbors said to me, 'We feel like you heard us fighting next door, and you went and told the writers what we said.'"

Perhaps such verisimilitude springs from Raymond's close association to Romano's own life: Until he moved his family to L.A. this summer, he really did live in New York, near his parents--and his sometimes obsessive cop brother. "My father gets a kick out of it because all the guys at the Elks will go, 'Did you do that?' and he'll go, 'Yeah! Damn right!'" says Romano. "But my brother is a New York City policeman, and [his fellow cops] never let him hear the end of it."

Romano says there's not much difference between TV Ray and real-life Ray, either: "Basically we're the same--we're always trying to keep the peace, and we're equally neurotic." Romano and Heaton, however, will confess to a few fallacies about his character. Heaton: "You talk to me a lot more than you do to your wife." Romano: "When you see TV Ray walk in and say, 'Hi, honey,' and he and his wife kiss hello, that's a fantasy."

It wasn't long ago that having his own sitcom seemed like a fantasy to Romano. He spent 12 years on the road as a stand-up, watching other comics get snapped up for series-development deals. He thought he'd finally gotten his big break when he was cast in NewsRadio's 1994 pilot, only to be replaced by Joe Rogan after two days of rehearsal. "My manager called at seven in the morning and said, 'They're going in another direction.' I said, 'Tell me which way--I'll meet them there,'" cracks Romano. "It was upsetting, but I was relieved. I felt so out of place there. I see Andy Dick now, and he's always like, 'No, you were great, man!' And I tell him, 'No, I wasn't. It wasn't real, it wasn't organic, it wasn't anything.'"

Then, in 1995, Romano did a guest shot on CBS' Late Show With David Letterman--and caught the host's eye. "Thank God Dave was looking over from the desk," says Romano. A few days later, Rob Burnett, then working for Letterman's production company, Worldwide Pants, called the stand-up. "He was like, 'If you're considering [doing a sitcom] with somebody else, consider us first.' I didn't want to tell him, 'I'll sign right now--there's nobody else!'"

Romano interviewed 11 writers to pen the pilot script and settled on Coach vet Rosenthal, a boyishly enthusiastic 37-year-old (and fellow Queens native) who brings new meaning to the title "show runner"--every detail, from punchlines to wardrobe, is filtered through him. "The first thing I thought was, Here's a comedian who hasn't acted before, you should do something that's close to his own life," remembers Rosenthal. "He starts telling me about the twins and the parents who live close by and the brother's a police officer who lives with them, and I'm like, 'Lemme get a pencil.'"

The initial script wasn't a big hit with CBS execs. For one thing, they wanted Ray's parents living in the house with him. "I said, 'Can we compromise?' because that's very sitcommy," says Rosenthal. "Okay, across the street, fine, you don't lose the store over that. But then they said, 'Can you move it to the suburbs and could their name not end in a vowel?' We moved it from Queens to Long Island, but I cheated because their name still ends in a vowel--Barone."

Casting presented another problem. Romano and Rosenthal wanted Maggie Wheeler (Chandler's whiny ex-girlfriend on Friends) to play Ray's wife, Debra. CBS "thought it was too ethnic for me and her to be together," says Romano, whose actual wife looks more like Wheeler than Heaton (Wheeler did wind up on the show, as Ray's best friend's spouse). The net proposed Jane Sibbett (Ross' WASPy ex-wife on Friends). "We thought that was just too un-ethnic," says Romano. A week before the pilot taping, everybody agreed to cast the dark-haired-but-not-too-ethnic Heaton as Debra.

The decision proved wise. Heaton, who had languished in lame sitcoms like Room for Two and Women of the House, has turned a potentially thankless straight-woman role into a sarcastic tour de force. "I didn't think the show was necessarily going to be funny for my character," admits Heaton. Once the writers got to know her, though, they decided to spotlight her strengths. Says Rosenthal: "Most wives on TV, you don't give them the jokes. She does the jokes, she does attitude, she cries funny--she's like Mary Tyler Moore."

After Raymond finally hit the air last fall, there was one more obstacle to surmount: Nobody was watching. "The time slot was insane," says Roberts of the Friday-at-8:30 berth. "Most people thought it was a children's show and weren't interested." CBS tried to beef up male viewership by having Romano's sportswriter character chat with jocks on the show. "We did it because we had to do it," sighs Rosenthal of the stunts. "Honestly, I thought it was ridiculous to have Tommy Lasorda in his kitchen and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in his living room. What, he brings these people home?"

Despite its loser ratings, Raymond won over critics and, more important, CBS president Les Moonves, who moved it to a better spot--Mondays at 8:30 p.m., after Cosby--for a six-week tryout last spring. The show immediately jumped into the top 30, and the network brought it back in the same slot for its second season. Romano says he's happy with the ratings (it's now ranked No. 37 and regularly beats its sitcom competition, NBC's Fired Up): "I want it to be No. 1, but then I wouldn't be able to handle it."

The network hasn't given up on that goal. "They always say, 'Give us something to promote.' I'm like, 'How 'bout a good show?'" says Rosenthal. "I'm doing this for CBS, but in the back of my mind, I'm doing it for Nick at Nite. I set out to do a traditional, well-made show. What's our gimmick? We're half decent."

CBS has other gimmicks in mind. The network wanted The Nanny's Fran Drescher, a classmate of Romano's at Queens' Hillcrest High School, to do a crossover cameo in the reunion episode. "That was a purely publicity-driven idea," says Rosenthal. "But she told us she doesn't have to do our show--she's in syndication, honey."

Still, the Eye managed one November-sweeps crossover, lining up Romano and Boyle to appear on Cosby (it turns out Boyle's and Cosby's characters went to high school together). For Romano, though, this was more than just a publicity stunt; it was a chance to work with one of his stand-up idols: The first record he ever owned was Bill Cosby's To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With. "We were rehearsing a scene where I drag Cosby on stage," says Romano, "and he said, 'When you pull me out and I say no, shush me.'" Romano obliged in his singsongy style, prompting everyone to laugh, and Cosby to fall to his knees. "It was the weirdest thing. I'm with Bill Cosby--how did I get here?--and he's hugging my legs."