Everybody Loves Raymond

The Barone Family – Robert, Frank, Debra, Ray and Marie

After I'd seen all of the old Monk episodes (I may have missed one or two, but I doubt it), I needed something else to catch up on.

For a while, I was DVR'ing Angela Lansbury's Murder She Wrote, but kind of lost interest in the J.B. Fletcher mystery after a couple of months. Then one day, I was channel surfing and came across Everybody Loves Raymond on TBS. Now THAT jabbed me right in the funny spot.

Since then, I have been DVR'ing four episodes a day and watching them later in the evening. Four aren't much, they whiz by pretty quickly. Four half-hour episodes actually work out to only an hour and a half of actual programming time.

The sitcom's premise is simple: Sports columnist Ray Barone (Ray Romano) is married to Debra (Patricia Heaton); they have a daughter and twin sons – Ally, Michael and Geoffrey (real-life siblings . Madylin, Sullivan and Sawyer). Ray's parents, Frank and Marie (Peter Boyle Doris Roberts) live across the street, and they are visited frequently by Ray's giant of a brother, Robert (Brad Garrett).

Talk about a dysfunctional family. Robert has an inferiority complex, Frank is gross and curt, Marie is passively aggressive and critical, Debra has a hot temper, and Ray is ... well, Ray is a wimp. Put 'em all together and you have the recipe for an irritating show (which it can be at times) that somehow ends up making you laugh ... because it's really yourself that you're laughing at.

I even watched an HBO documentary, Exporting Raymond, that chronicled the show producer's (Phillip Rosenthal) journey to Russia to adapt Raymond for Russian audiences. Now that in itself was funny.

I'd forgotten how I'd enjoyed the old half-hour sitcoms.