‘Everybody Loves Raymond’: Why 30th Anniversary Reunion Is 29 Years After Show’s Debut & How Ray Romano’s Emmy Bit With Brad Garrett Came To Be

On Nov. 24, CBS will air Everybody Loves Raymond: 30th Anniversary Reuniona 90-minute special celebrating the Emmy-winning comedy series. While reuniting the surviving cast of the show for the first time is great news for fans, its timing is interesting as the special comes a little over 29 years after the multi-camera sitcom starring Ray Romano premiered on CBS Sept. 13, 1996.

Romano, on whose life and comedy Everybody Loves Raymond was partially based, and series creator Phil Rosenthal explained the special’s somewhat odd release date.

“That was just rounding off,” Romano said.

The timing of the special was driven largely by demand after several previous reunion attempts by Rosenthal had failed.

“The reason I think they’re doing it now is because they [CBS] wanted it now,” he said. “I’ve been trying to have a reunion special for 10 years, I was ready to do the 20th anniversary, I was ready to do the 25th anniversary, but there wasn’t an appetite for it at CBS. Amy [Reisenbach]who’s the new president, she was very into it, she’s absolutely lovely and great, and I’m happy to do it. I don’t care when it is. I just selfishly wanted to see my friends and celebrate our nice show.

Earlier this year, the Paley Center in New York did an exhibit “30 Years of Everybody Loves Raymond: A Behind-the-Scenes Tribute,” which ran June-September. It gave Romano and Rosenthal an idea to try the reunion special again tied to the show’s 30th anniversary, initially in conjunction with the Paley celebration.

“We tried to get it together for the when the Paley Center [exhibit] was there, but for technical reasons, we couldn’t,” Romano said. “But then CBS had an opening for this November week, they said, ‘You know what, it’d be great to put it on during Thanksgiving week.’ So yeah, technically, it’s a few months earlier for our 30th anniversary, but it is the 30th anniversary of what I did Letterman, which got me the production deal to make the sitcom there.”

It was Romano’s appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman in 1995 that prompted Letterman’s production company to sign a sitcom deal with him that led to Everybody Loves Raymond. Rosenthal also saw Romano’s set on the Late Show and was among the writers the comedian met with for the show. The two immediately hit it off, blending their family experiences to craft the fictional Barone family.

“I can honestly say that the show was born 30 years ago,” Rosenthal said. “Because that’s when I met Ray, in 95, and I wrote the pilot in 95 so the show was actually born 30 years ago.”

The October 1 announcement of the the Everybody Loves Raymond reunion special came only two weeks after Romano and co-star Brad Garrett‘s mini-reunion at the Emmy Awards to present the Outstanding Comedy Series award. Their bit, in which Garrett worried whether he would make the show’s In Memoriam segment one day, was one of the night’s highlights and went viral. (You can watch it below.)

At the time, talks with CBS for a reunion special were already well underway but did the success of Romano and Garrett’s Emmy appearance helped seal the deal?

“I’m not sure,” Romano said, explaining that he was approached two or three weeks before the Emmy ceremony to present the top comedy award.

“I said, ‘Well, it’d be good if I did it with Brad. They agreed to that, and then we had to come up with the idea, and we toiled over,” Romano said. “It’s funny because it looks like it’s just 90 seconds of stuff that we thought of yesterday. And that’s so not the case. For those things when you present, especially for me as a comedian, I have to deliver something funny. It’s fun to do, but it’s so much more work than people think it is. It ended up going well, but that was me and Brad, we wrote it.”

Romano said that he in not on social media and didn’t know that the video of him and Garrett had gone viral but admitted that “I did get a lot of feedback from it. I did get people telling me that they really liked the little bit we did. It was great.”

Everybody Loves Raymond: 30th Anniversary Reunion airs Nov. 24 on the series’ signature night, Monday, from 8 to 9:30 p.m. and streaming on Paramount+.

Hosted by Romano and Rosenthal, the special features appearances by cast members Garrett, Patricia Heaton, Monica Horan, Madylin Sweeten and Sullivan Sweeten. It also pays tribute to late cast members Doris Roberts, Peter Boyle, and Sawyer Sweeten.