43 Fun Facts About Everybody Loves Raymond

On Everybody Loves Raymond, Ray Barone is a sportswriter for which newspaper?

Newsday is Ray's paper, and his father wants in: after Reader's Digest prints a piece of his, Frank writes a column of his own and asks Ray to hand it to his editor.

Which network aired Everybody Loves Raymond for its entire nine-season run?

CBS first put the show on Friday nights, where it flopped; moved to Mondays in March 1997, it found its audience and stayed on the network until 2005.

Whose late-night show led to Everybody Loves Raymond?

David Letterman's company signed Ray Romano after a five-minute Late Show set in 1995: 'by the end we already had lawyers lined up', its chief said. The sitcom that followed ran for 210 episodes.

In which Long Island town do the Barones live?

Lynbrook, in Nassau County, is home to the Barones, though the family they are drawn from stayed in the city: Ray Romano grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, and in 1997 still lived in Queens, down the street from his parents.

Who created Everybody Loves Raymond?

Philip Rosenthal kept the show close to Ray Romano's real family because, he said, it was funnier than anything he could have dreamed up; his own relatives fed into the characters too.

Everybody Loves Raymond takes its title from a sarcastic remark by which of Ray Romano's relatives?

His brother Richard, comparing his own job with Ray's comedy awards, cracked that 'everybody loves Raymond'. Romano hated it as a title and asked the network to change it, in vain.

What nervous habit is Robert Barone known for?

Touching food to his chin before eating is the tic the family calls his 'crazy chin', and the show traces it to childhood anxiety: it began when baby Raymond took all of their mother's attention.

What is Robert Barone's profession?

NYPD police officer is Robert's job, and he nearly trades it for the FBI: he lands an interview, only for Marie to scorch his lucky suit with the iron and then send the interviewer a fax about her son.

What is Frank Barone's signature catchphrase?

"Holy crap" greets every shock in the Barone house, as when a woman tells the family she is 'kind of dating' Ray while his wife stands right there.

What did Frank Barone do for a living before retiring?

Bookkeeper, 'not even an accountant', is how Frank puts it: home from Korea with no skills, he lost a string of jobs first, one to a bowling alley's ball-return machine, and admits he hated the desk.

What is the name of the lodge Frank Barone belongs to?

Order of the Caribou is the lodge that votes Frank its Man of the Year; filming a tribute for the big night, Ray and Robert find that none of his lodge brothers has a kind word to say about him.

What is Debra Barone's maiden name on Everybody Loves Raymond?

Whelan: her wealthy Connecticut parents, Warren and Lois, look like the calm opposite of the Barones until one Thanksgiving shows how unhappy they are, and by the season's end they have separated.

Before marrying Ray Barone, Debra worked in public relations for which team?

New York Rangers: when Ray, a futon delivery man who dreamed of sportswriting, learned that his customer did the team's PR, his first question was whether she knew the players.

What does Robert Barone ask whenever he walks into a room and the family falls silent?

"Is this about me?" is Robert's reflex after a lifetime in his brother's shadow: a happy room must be about Raymond, he reasons, so a tense one must be his fault.

What were the Barone twins named in the pilot, before they became Geoffrey and Michael?

Gregory and Matthew are Ray Romano's real twin sons; after the pilot the boys on screen were renamed, though Ally went on sharing a name with his real daughter for all nine seasons.

How was Robert Barone once injured on the job?

Gored by a bull at an illegal rodeo, Robert took the horn in the backside and lost his nerve for work; he tried telemarketing until Ray took him to a petting zoo to make peace with the bull.

Who played Frank Barone?

Peter Boyle got lost on the way to his audition and walked in flustered and irritable, which was Frank to the life; the role brought him seven Emmy nominations and no win.

The actor who played Ray Barone's father on Everybody Loves Raymond had earlier starred in which Mel Brooks film?

Young Frankenstein (1974) cast him as the Monster, famously tap-dancing to 'Puttin' on the Ritz'; he also played the cabbie Wizard in Taxi Driver.

Who played the meddling matriarch Marie Barone?

Doris Roberts heard that over a hundred actresses had already read for Marie and drove to her audition unprepared and in a bad mood; her frustration made the room laugh, and the part won her four Emmys.

Who played Ray's towering brother Robert?

Brad Garrett won three Emmys as Ray's put-upon older brother, though he is the younger man by more than two years: he was born in April 1960, Romano in December 1957.

Who played Debra Barone?

Patricia Heaton came to the part of a sportswriter's wife as a sportswriter's daughter. Her real pregnancies during the run were never written in: the show hid them, and Debra stayed a mother of three.

Who played Amy MacDougall?

Monica Horan, who married the show's creator in 1990, kept being written back as Amy: she and Robert split up again and again over six seasons before finally marrying at the end of the seventh.

The child actors who played the Barone twins, Geoffrey and Michael, were real-life brothers of which young actress?

Madylin Sweeten, who played Ally, is the big sister of Sawyer and Sullivan Sweeten; her twin brothers took over the parts after the pilot, in which a set of triplets had shared them.

Which Italian dish does Debra Barone finally cook so well that Marie takes it as a threat?

Braciole, stuffed beef, has Ray, Robert and Frank coming back for more after years of her lemon chicken; a jealous Marie confronts Debra, and it is war.

Which King of Queens cast member first played a friend of Ray Barone's on Everybody Loves Raymond?

Kevin James played Ray's golf buddy Kevin Daniels in the early seasons, and the guest spots led to a sitcom of his own in 1998; Ray Barone then turned up on The King of Queens in several crossovers.

Which comic actor played Amy's father, Hank MacDougall, in the later seasons?

Fred Willard played Hank MacDougall as a strait-laced Pennsylvanian who turns up to talk Amy out of marrying Robert; the part brought him an Emmy nomination in each of the show's last three seasons.

Ray Romano is also the voice of which character in the Ice Age films?

Manny the mammoth was first imagined with a big voice like James Earl Jones's; the director found that too obvious and, once Romano read a few of the lines, called it a eureka moment.

Ray Barone turns up at a high-school reunion on which other sitcom, whose star was Ray Romano's real classmate?

The Nanny sends Fran Fine to her class reunion, where the man at the buffet turns round and is Ray Barone: Romano and Fran Drescher really were classmates at Hillcrest High in Queens.

In 2002 three Everybody Loves Raymond actors won Emmys, but which show beat it to Outstanding Comedy Series?

Friends took the series prize, and its star Jennifer Aniston took one more from Raymond: the lead-actress Emmy, which Raymond's own leading lady had won in each of the two years before.

Which Everybody Loves Raymond episode, about Debra's PMS, won the actress who plays her the show's first acting Emmy?

Bad Moon Rising, co-written by Ray Romano, has Ray record one of his wife's outbursts and play it back to her to prove his point; the fight that follows is what won the actress her Emmy.

What does Ray say the family needs as Everybody Loves Raymond ends?

A bigger table: Debra says it is getting crowded, Ray agrees, and the picture fades with the family still talking over breakfast. 32.9 million watched, the largest audience of the show's run.

Which engraved Christmas gift from Ray Barone do his parents trade in without even opening the box?

A toaster, engraved with a Christmas message from the whole family: Frank and Marie swap it at Bloomingdale's for a coffee machine, then learn what it said and try, disastrously, to get it back.

The actor who played Frank Barone suffered what medical emergency on the Everybody Loves Raymond set in 1999?

A heart attack struck him on set near the end of the third season: three episodes went ahead without Frank, and after a summer's recovery he came back to play him for six more years.

What do Ray and Debra Barone leave on the stairs for three weeks, each refusing to be the one to move it?

A suitcase from a weekend away, in the Emmy-winning episode 'Baggage'; Marie then admits that the giant fork and spoon on her kitchen wall are the relic of the same kind of standoff with Frank.

What does Marie's abstract artwork resemble in the episode "Marie's Sculpture"?

Female genitalia is what Ray and Debra see at once and Marie does not, even as she donates the piece to the church auction; it takes the nuns who come to collect it to make her look again.

In Everybody Loves Raymond's final season, Frank and Marie move to a retirement community in which state, only to be thrown out?

New Jersey: they sell the house to Robert and Amy and leave for a condo there, but their behaviour gets them kicked out, and they move back in as their son's guests.

Which NFL legend guest-starred as himself in the Everybody Loves Raymond episode "Debra's Sick"?

Terry Bradshaw plays himself: with the family down with flu, Ray holds their meeting in a pediatrician's waiting room, where he learns he has brought the healthy twin and left the sick one at home.

In Everybody Loves Raymond's hour-long "Italy" episode, whom do the Barones travel to visit?

Marie's cousin Colletta, strictly her mother's cousin, lives in a village outside Rome, and Marie pays for the whole family to go with money she has secretly put aside for 45 years; only Ray is unwilling.

What minor operation does Ray Barone undergo in the final episode of Everybody Loves Raymond?

Having his adenoids removed is Ray's minor operation; when he is slow to wake from the anaesthetic the family panics, then agrees to keep the scare from him once he comes round.

In Everybody Loves Raymond's "Marie's Meatballs", what does Marie give Debra so that her attempt at the recipe fails?

Tarragon labelled as basil is what Marie hands over, and she is caught when the fake label peels off the jar. Cornered, she admits she panicked: her cooking is the one thing her grown son still needs her for.

What is the title of the 2010 documentary about adapting Everybody Loves Raymond for Russian television?

Exporting Raymond is the creator's own film of the job: he flew to Moscow to help a Russian team remake his sitcom, hit one cultural roadblock after another, and directed and narrated the result.

The Russian adaptation of Everybody Loves Raymond was broadcast under what title?

The Voronins (Voroniny) outlived its model: once all 210 American scripts were used up it carried on with stories of its own, passing 450 episodes and, in 2017, entering Guinness World Records as the longest-running adapted show.

On the Barones' trip to Italy, Robert falls at first sight for Stefania, who earns her living how?

Selling gelato: Frank calls what hits Robert 'the thunderbolt', and he courts her for the rest of the trip over her father's objections; later that season she turns up to see him in America.