For (probably not) the last time, there will be no Everybody Loves Raymond reboot.
Amid a flurry of reboots, revivals, and remakes of classic TV shows like Little House on the Prairie, Scrubs, and The X-Files, one sitcom stands apart: Everybody Loves Raymond. Stars Ray Romano and Patricia Heaton continue to vow the series will never return for new episodes.
“No, there won’t be a reboot,” Romano told New York Post unequivocally on the red carpet of a 30-year celebration of the CBS series at New York City’s Paley Museum.
Why?
“The obvious is: Peter [Boyle] and Doris [Roberts] and one of the kids, they’re no longer with us,” Romano explained. “We’re all heartbroken. They’re a big part of the show, the dynamic.”
Heaton concurred, saying, “To try to do it again without the cast members that we’ve lost would be a disservice to the show.”
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Created by Romano and Philip Rosenthal in 1996, Everybody Loves Raymond centered on the lives of an Italian family living on Long Island and anchored by Romano’s sports journalist Ray Barone and his wife Debra, played by Heaton.
The core cast was rounded out by Doris Roberts and Peter Boyle, who played Ray’s parents Marie and Frank, Brad Garrett, who played his brother Robert, Monica Horan, who played Robert’s wife, Amy, and Madilyn, Sawyer, and Sullivan Sweeten, who played Ray’s kids Ally, Geoffrey, and Michael.
The show concluded after nine seasons in 2005, and since then, the Everybody Loves Raymond cast has faced a number of devastating losses, putting a major kibosh on any enthusiasm there might have been for another look into the lives of the Barone clan.
Roberts died in 2016 at the age of 90, Boyle died from multiple myeloma and heart disease in 2006 at 71, and Sawyer Sweeten died by suicide in 2015 at 19.
“Without them, I don’t know what the dynamic is. We love the show too much, we respect it too much to even try to do it,” Romano said. Heaton added that, “You shouldn’t try to go back and redo something that is pretty much perfect. We need to just leave it there and let people enjoy it for what it was.”
Multiple members of the Everybody Loves Raymond cast have made their lack of interest in a reboot abundantly clear in recent years. Romano said in December that he wouldn’t “want it rebooted in America” — nodding to several international adaptations of the sitcom — because the series he built from the ground up “was very personal to me.”
Heaton has previously cited the deaths of Roberts, Boyle, and Sweeten as three big reasons not to return, but noted in February that the series “was just sort of perfection — and you don’t wanna mess with perfection.”
Rosenthal even said in 2021 that the disinterest extends beyond the cast, noting that pitches to multiple networks for a reunion special resulted in “no takers,” which he noted, “I really can’t believe.”
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