Not Everybody Loves Raymond

Have you ever noticed how, if you have cable, some shows are on, like, all the time? It seems some of the smaller networks just don't have much in their reportoire, and so they wind up showing the same stuff over and over. Sometimes, this is a good thing--e.g., if I find myself wanting to just veg out for an hour or so in the evening, I can almost always watch Law & Order. And if I want to veg out for half an hour, I can almost always watch Scrubs. But there is a dark side to this phenomena, as I experienced the other day when I accidentally watched an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, which is another show that's on all the friggin' time. Unfortunately.


So, how did I "accidentally" watch this show, you ask? Fair enough question, but I swear, it was a legitimate mistake. I was talking on the phone and had the T.V. on (muted) and was channel surfing (yes, while the T.V. was muted. Doesn't everyone do this??). Then the phone conversation got suddenly very interesting, and I stopped channel surfing to devote my attention to the call. The phone call went on for a while, and when it was over, I hung up the phone and unmuted the television in one fluid, subconscious movement. (Yes, I'm graceful like that.) And I sat there for a while, thinking about the conversation I'd just had. Gradually, it dawned on me that the T.V. was no longer showing the program I had landed on when I stopped surfing (The Simpsons) and was now showing another program (You Know What). And I had been kind of watching this new show for a few minutes (while thinking, you know?), and now I was kind of actively watching it, completely by accident. Makes total sense, yes?


And there's just no other way to say this--I fucking hate this show. It's not funny. The entire concept is so tired. (Seriously, how many sitcoms have been done or are being done right now centering around the whole suburban-family-with-idiosyncracies shtick? Count them. I dare you.) Every character in this show is a stereotype taken to the extreme. The nagging, intrusive mother-in-law. The boorish father-in-law who never misses an opportunity to say something hateful and not-funny about his wife. The doofus older brother. Adorable children who just kind of hang around sometimes but are mostly absent and have no discernible impact on the lives of their parents.* An assortment of wacky neighbors, acquaintances, maintenance guys, and hangers-on. And, my personal favorites--the bitchy, annoying wife with absolutely no sense of humor, whose personality has been molded by the fact that her husband is a whiny, childlike character who can't be depended on to rear their (mostly absent) children correctly or to make any thoughtful decisions whatsoever, and so the situation has devolved to the point where he is basically another one of her children and a constant source of stress to her, as well as a constant receptacle of her bitching, and they never have sex, and when they do it's a major event, and the whole show revolves around this. Absolutely fucking hilarious.


The really insipid part, though, is that this show was conceptualized and is presented as the Everyman Show. Everything about it is designed to appear . . . well, take your pick--normal (whatever that is), bland, average, unremarkable, inoffensive, noncontroversial. The people are average looking. The house is bland. There's not a single character developed to the point of being even slightly interesting. And nothing ever happens. (And not in the way that nothing ever happens on Seinfeld--that was intentional.)


So, what we wind up with is a show featuring the scenario like the one I saw the other night. Please forgive me for actually outlining the plot of an ELR episode, but it's kind of essential to the post:


In brief, Raymond and his brother are out of town on a trip for some reason, and they're hanging out in this hotel room (which is the noncontroversial thing for two grown men on their own in a strange city to be doing). One thing leads to another (through, of course, an unlikely yet wacky but still innocuous chain of events that I won't try to recreate here), and they wind up losing Raymond's wedding ring. As gripping and drama-ridden as this plot turn already is, it gets even more complicated. At the airport waiting for his flight home the next day, Raymond gets hit on by an extremely attractive woman who, of course, is irrisistibly drawn to this average looking, not very clever man due to the fact that he is not wearing a wedding ring. (Yep, that's pretty much how it is with us single women. We see a bare wedding-ring finger, we move in for the kill.) Raymond graciously yet politely turns her down, immediately (which is the noncontroversial thing for a grown man . . . ah, you get the point). So, whew! Close call there, huh? Isn't that enough drama for one episode?


Oh no, it is not. In fact, we're just getting started. Raymond makes it home, and eventually his wife finds out about both the lost ring and the hitting-upon incident (despite Raymond's not-very-smart-yet-wacky attempts to conceal both from her). And, of course, she totally hits the roof. She's furious with him for accidentally losing his ring and then being hit on by someone while he's just passively sitting around. The fact that he subsequently turns this person down doesn't seem to matter one bit--someone hit on him while he was sitting in the airport! And that's the dramatic tension that needs to be resolved by the end of the half-hour. This situation is presented as an actual problem.


You know what my problem is? The fact that this show ran for almost 10 years and was wildly popular. And the fact that it will probably be in syndication for about the next 125 years and will continue to be watched by millions of people every day--on purpose! This is the kind of thing that makes me cynical about the future of humankind.



*This will heretofore be known as the "Rachel and Ross's Baby Syndrome." That kid was never around. It was like they never had her. This, to me, has a much more negative impact on the minds on our youth than any depiction of drug use, premarital sex, etc. Really, you have all these shows where people have babies and then just carry on with their lives as usual. What a cruel message to send to young people.