"Everybody Loves Raymond" Says Goodbye

Written by: Xil

Whether you like it or not, the age of the sitcom is dead. More than anything nowadays you're likely to find a reality show or an action show with a mysterious plot, rather than any more of those 'situation comedies'. The sitcom is what many people considered to be the 80's revolution of television. Through this, the sitcom shaped a generation of quirky easy-to-get-into, hard-to-get-out stories with characters we all grew to love.

Everybody Loves Raymond was a show with a simple premise. A man marries his wife and has 3 kids. Blubbering about left and right and complaining continually, he manages to build a good home while his stay-at-home wife deals with the issues of "marrying an idiot" and nosy in-laws. Many people saw the show as something that would be of a dying breed. Coming on television in a transitional era was a iffy move, and in the beginning reviews and viewer statistics came out to be iffy. However, keeping the show on would be one of the best moves CBS ever made.

With the show now officially ended, many consider this last testament to sitcom television to have sealed the deal. Shows such as Two and a Half Men, although funny, just don't live up to the quality which we've seen in the past. Many attribute this to poor acting and bad timing. However, it's more likely that comparing such shows to a smash hit like Everybody Loves Raymond is like comparing regular apples to giant granny smith apples-- in other words, it's all in the writing.

Raymond had a quality few shows possess. The writers stayed on all nine seasons, and the stories are all (or for the most part) based on things which happened to them. By using stories which had actually happened, the writers made the characters appeal more to the viewers, and through that we saw more honest people than anything.

With the death of Raymond we must now wait until the next big hit comes along, and it's an unfortunate truth that we have quite the wait ahead of us.