Who Loved Raymond, Anyway?
by Bob Cook

"Everybody Loves Raymond," which airs its finale tonight, often was criticized as nothing more than another bland family sitcom. In reality, it was the darkest depiction of family life ever portrayed on American TV.

With its constantly bickering and miserable characters stuck in tortuous relationships and situations from which they could not possibly escape, "Everybody Loves Raymond" could have been Jean-Paul Sartre's sequel to "No Exit." Even the sets aren't all that different — just wrap a plastic cover and toss a few throw pillows onto a Second French Empire couch, and there you go.

In "Everybody Loves Raymond," we learn that you always hurt the ones you love — with glee, and varying degrees of passive-aggressiveness. We learn that sibling rivalries never end. That nothing brings pleasure like seeing a family member fail. That parents play favorites. That mothers can have borderline erotic love for their sons. That wives are hectoring shrews. That husbands are do-nothing idiots. That husbands with such mothers and such wives can't tell one or the other to stuff it, creating their own cowardly purgatory of womanly fear. That the wife who originally tried to solve this problem by being nice to her mother-in-law will grow bruised and bitter as she gets beaten with her own olive leaf.

That your children will expose all of this when you least expect it. That those same children will stink in sports. That you can screw up those children through things that didn't seem to be a big deal at the time, but that come back to haunt you and them well into their adulthood. That any touching moment is inevitably ruined by someone saying something completely inappropriate.

That modern American family life is negotiating your way through the emotional fascism of familial relationships only to get sucked into the emotional fascism of fellow parents who yell at you if you dare to bring anything less healthful than zucchini in your role as snack parent for your daughter's softball team.

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That in trying to escape all of this in perpetual singlehood, one will grow to be a lonely, messed-up shell of a person.

And the darkest theme of all — that this is what a happy family looks like. That this is a best-case scenario. There never is a happy ending, because this only ends with your death.

My god, how did this show last for nine seasons, much less become America's most popular sitcom?

Laughters of recognition. Laughters of head-shaking, gut-busting, soul-crushing recognition.

For eons, it seems, the entertainment industry has deluged Americans with syrupy, escapist depictions of the Perfect Family, with shows like the most inaccurately titled show in television history — "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" — leading the way. Yes, "All in the Family" and others gave more of an edge to family life, but those were just proxies for the politics of the writers. (And let's face it, Norman Lear really screwed his own pooch by making Archie Bunker a lovable bigot.)

Shows that make it clear they're trying to slice open the rotten underbelly of so-called perfect red state life haven't delivered a real shock since "Peyton Place." Sure, "Desperate Housewives" is popular, but who believes it? It's easy enough to watch the travails of Wisteria Lane and escape because it's probably not your family. (Well, the dishy leads make it easy on the eyes, too.)

But "Everybody Loves Raymond" delivered this shock. The writers (Sartre is not credited) had an ear for the deaths-by-a-thousand-cuts, Chinese-water-torture nature of domestic life. Maybe they didn't mean to make it sound so cruel, inhumane and inescapable. But they did. For that reason, it wouldn't be shocking that while the ratings generally were strong, the show wasn't always watched by the same people every year. The problem with families is not too little intimacy, but too much — too much hearing your cousins fart or your mother talk about her gall bladder. That also was the problem with "Everybody Loves Raymond," and like with real family, you had to get away for a while before you could handle more of it.

Interestingly, "Everybody Loves Raymond" is not ending with a slam-bang finale, but a regular show, sending the message that the Barones, between their endless syndication and their untied loose ends, will be in an existential state of suspended togetherness — with no exit.

Yes, hell is other people. Especially if you're related to them.