Unlike the beloved sitcom of our youth Malcolm in the Middle, the iconic Everybody Loves Raymond will not be participating in the reboot trend, according to the cast of the series.
“There won’t be a reboot,” the show’s star Ray Romano recently told The New York Post while attending a 30-year anniversary celebration of the series at the Paley Museum in New York City. “The obvious is Peter [Boyle] and Doris [Roberts], and one of the kids — they’re no longer with us. We’re all heartbroken. They’re a big part of the show, the dynamic.”
He added: “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 attended the event alongside Maggie Wheeler (who appeared in a guest-starring role as Linda Grunefelder), series creator Phil Rosenthal, and costar Patricia Heaton, who played Ray’s wife Debra.
Heaton told the outlet: “To try to do it again without the cast members that we’ve lost would be a disservice to the show. 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.”
Boyle, who played Ray’s father Frank, died in 2006, while Roberts, who played his mother Marie, died 10 years later in 2016. Additionally, Sawyer Sweeten, who played Ray and Debra’s son Geoffrey, passed away one year prior in 2015.
The show ran for a wonderful nine seasons, from 1996 to 2005.
As for Malcolm in the Middle, the series is set for a four-episode reboot with Disney+ starring nearly all the original cast — minus Erik Per Sullivan, who previously played Dewey but will now be attending Harvard for his Master’s degree. Though filming did wrap on the project, it has yet to announce a release date.
Photo by Richard Cartwright/CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images.
Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.
