Everybody, Including NAB, Loves Raymond

Everybody Loves Raymond is the newest member of the NAB Broadcasting Hall of Fame, formally inducted Monday at the NAB Show in Las Vegas for being “a show that makes you laugh without fail every time you turn it on.”

NAB CEO Gordon Smith did the honors, welcoming the series cast, including star Ray Romano, who, Smith said, for nine seasons “we watched as the family bickered, realizing their love for each other no mater what always come out on top.”

The series, which originally aired on CBS, ended in 2005 with a series finale that drew 32 million viewers, Smith said. The show consistently ranks among the top five syndicated programs, he says.

Creator Phil Rosenthal said he credits the success of Everybody Loves Raymond to its real-life roots. Rosenthal says he adopted a technique for creating storylines pioneered by Carl Reiner, who told Dick Van Dyke Show writers to report “what happened in your house this week.”

“If you worked on the show, your job was to go home, get in a fight with your wife and come back and tell me about it. All the best stuff comes from that,” Rosenthal said. “It wasn’t so much writing as it was taking dictation.”

That has spread the show’s continual worldwide appeal, too, he said.

“Everybody has or has had parents, has a significant other, has children, has relatives. So that’s it,” he says.

Romano credited cast members — Patricia Heaton, Doris Roberts, Brad Garrett, Monica Horan and the late Peter Boyle — as well as series writers and broadcasters with giving longevity to the show, which didn’t perform well when it launched on Friday nights in 1996.

Ratings didn’t improve until the last six weeks of the first season, when CBS’s Leslie Moonves moved the show to Mondays immediately following The Cosby Show, Romano said.

Ratings worries — which turned out to be unfounded — returned when Everybody Loves Raymond was scheduled to air against Fox’s Ally McBeal and Monday Night Football on ABC, he says. “We figured the women would watch Ally McBeal, the men would watch Monday Night Football. Who’s left?”

Another influential figure in the series’ success was David Letterman, whose production company, Worldwide Pants, first showed an interest in developing a show for Romano after the comic’s first appearance on The Late Show, he said.

Having worked as a standup comic for 11 years at that point, Romano says he had no bargaining chips when he first got the call from Letterman’s people, who asked Romano to not sign with any other production company before giving Worldwide Pants a chance at a development deal first.

“I told them on the phone, there’s nobody else,” Romano said.