re: Everybody Loves Raymond

I had never watched this until a couple of years ago. I was struck by a few things:

1) How old fashioned, almost Ozzie and Harriet, many of the situations are. The wife is actually a stay at home mom who worries b/c she can't cook as well as her mother in law!

2) It wavers between classical sitcom form and post-Seinfeld quirky. Sometimes it's a standard sitcom, in both style and content, that could have been a Dick Van Dyke Show episode 50 years ago. Other times it's all the cast members standing in a row like talking heads exchanging dialogue for 5+ minutes.

I can't talk about ELR without mentioning it had one of my all time favorite lines. Somebody tells Raymond he's wasting himself on sports and should write something serious, and he replies: "I don't want to write The Great American Novel. I don't even want to read The Great American Novel".