Failure of Imagination. Phil Rosenthal, executive producer of television's most popular sitcom today, Everybody Loves Raymond, admitted in an AP story today that the show is ending its nine-year run because his creative team just ran out of ideas:

"The reason we're stopping is that we've done every single thing that we can think of," Rosenthal said. "We are bone dry."

What happens when you run out of ideas but have things you still need to do, for which there is still public demand? Well, some people just close up shop anyway. Others seek new people with new ideas.
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Everybody Loves Raymond made a decision some years back to focus on the adults, not the three children. They decided that the parent-child dynamics they wanted to stress were those of the adults (the parents and grandparents), not the actual children, and they kept to that decision to the end.
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"Ray Barone" (the Ray whom everybody loves) has three children, a young-teen girl and younger twin boys. But teen girls couldn't possibly be interesting, and twins? Who's interested in the potentially complicated emotional lives of identical twin boys?
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"Robert Barone", Ray's middle-aged older brother, got married only a few months ago, after a long, insecure life spent mostly with his parents, and one failed marriage to a horrible woman. He and his wife's quirky parents couldn't provide an alternating focus to Raymond? Robert and Amy have no children. What if they decided to try fertility treatments and ended up with sextuplets? and Amy's Middle American, born-again Protestant parents moved close by to help out, where their value system and the Barones' laid-back New York Catholicism clash over how to raise the kids? Might that provide fresh territory for the show?
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Ray's wife, Debra (Deborah?) has been a stay-at-home wife for the show's duration. The children are now old enuf that she could return to the workforce in some capacity, but the show's producers couldn't see any potential in her choices, nor in the new parenting arrangements that Debra's getting home late after a long commute into Manhattan might make in Ray's relationship with his kids and extended family, nor the differences that might emerge between Ray's newly-working wife and his traditional stay-at-home mother.
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And what of Debra's new job? If she worked in Manhattan, she could choose among hundreds of different industries, in different-sized companies, where dynamics with co-workers (including attractive male co-workers) might become relevant to her family life. She might make more money than Ray. She might find work at a newspaper that competes with Ray's, promoting (she was a publicist before marriage) a competing sportswriter. Nope. No potential in any of that.
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How about an unexpected pregnancy for Debra? when Robert still hasn't been able to have children?
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How about weather conditions on Long Island, where the show is set, introducing complications? Long Island gets blizzards that pass by the inner portions of the Tristate Metropolitan Area — and hurricanes. No potential storylines there, as far as Rosenthal & Co. could see. No snow-induced auto accidents. No damage to either of the two houses across the street from one another as might force everybody temporarily under one roof — Ray, Debra, their three kids, Marie, Frank (the parents), Robert, Amy, and their six kids.
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Nor could Ray, a sportswriter who occasionally appeared on television, have lost his job due to a change in management or a public slip of the tongue, à la Jimmy the Greek, which might have rendered him at least temporarily a stay-at-home dad while his wife became sole breadwinner.
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Nor could the mother, Marie, meet a real gentleman who tempted her to leave her loutish husband. Nor could the parents realize from watching Antiques Roadshow that an heirloom one or the other of them has long had stored in the attic is hugely valuable, and selling it would empower one to do whatever he or she wanted, without the other exerting any restraint. No, Frank couldn't pursue the singing career he's always daydreamed about (modeled on Tony Bennett), nor Marie write a best-selling cookbook, be approached about doing a cooking show, and suddenly become too busy to bother anybody in the family.
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Robert, a New York City cop, couldn't possibly run afoul of the Mafia or a youth gang, which threatened the entire family. Nor could Ray's daughter shine so britely in gymnastics that the parents are approached about grooming her for the Olympics, even if that means she must enter an intensive boarding program in a distant city. Nor could the twins start to become aware of their sexuality, and realize one or both (more typical) are gay. Nor could Ray win a Pulitzer while Robert makes a horrible mistake that gets him demoted.
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No, I guess there just isn't anything the producers could have done to save the show for even one more season, much less another ten years.
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Did the producers even ask the cast what direction they'd like the show to go in? ask viewers for ideas? interview new writers? Or did Ray Romano, the star, just decide he was tired of it all and wanted to move on, so everyone else has to lose their job?
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I will miss Everybody Loves Raymond, but I won't watch it too often in reruns, because if I can remember how it ends, some episodes are too grating to watch. Writers of other shows, keep that in mind. For syndication, a show must be watchable over and over again. Tension must ultimately be outweighed by pleasantness. Disagreeable situations must be resolved away so one feels good about the characters and the resolution of problems. At end, we must laf with the characters, not at them.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:11 PM