‘Everybody Loves Raymond’: The Shocking Reason Why a Robert Spinoff Never Happened

Everybody Loves Raymond fans have been basking in the show’s recent reunion, celebrating its 30th anniversary, but did you know that the comedy almost had a spinoff?

In a recent interview for Dinner’s on Me with Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Phil Rosenthal got candid about the shocking reason a spinoff never happened. According to the sitcom creator, “I tried to make another sitcom after Raymond,” Rosenthal said, as he added, “They didn’t want it. I thought that was my purpose in life. Raymond was on nine years. I thought, ‘I guess I was put here to make sitcoms.'”

The idea for the spinoff Rosenthal had initially wanted to pursue was surrounding Ray Barone’s (Ray Romano) brother, Robert (Brad Garrett), and his personal life with wife Amy (Monica Horan, Rosenthal’s real-life wife). “Nobody wanted, not even the spin-off of Raymond, they didn’t want,” Rosenthal continued to share on the podcast episode.

As Rosenthal explained, the spinoff would have followed Robert and Amy’s lives and featured her family, who had frequently appeared on Everybody Loves Raymond. “They were established on the show,” Rosenthal shared. “And not only that, but her family was established on the show. Fred Willard, Georgia Engel, Chris Elliot,” he added. “They were in 30 episodes of the show. They were proven.”

As fans of the original show will recall, Willard and Engel played Amy’s parents, Hank and Pat McDougall, while Elliott portrayed her brother Peter, who had tried breaking Robert and Amy up.

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It wasn’t until I’ll Have What Phil’s Having, which eventually turned into Somebody Feed Phil, that Rosenthal got another show on television. “You know why they said they wouldn’t give us more than a pilot?” Rosenthal asked Ferguson, before he added, “Everyone was over 40. They said the business changed during the nine years of Raymond.”

And so the spinoff was killed due to the age of the cast. But would that ageism hold back a spinoff now? It doesn’t seem that we’ll ever find out, as Rosenthal previously stated, there are no plans to bring back characters from the Everybody Loves Raymond series, despite the televised reunion’s recent success.

But what do you think of this spinoff revelation? Would you have watched a Robert Barone-focused series? Sound off in the comments section.

Everybody Loves Raymond, Streaming now, Paramount+