Patricia Heaton says “The Middle” and “Everybody Loves Raymond” don’t need reboots: ‘You don’t wanna mess with perfection’

No reboots of Patricia Heaton’s shows Everybody Loves Raymond or The Middle, please.

“It was just sort of perfection — and you don’t wanna mess with perfection,” Heaton said of Everybody Loves Raymond in an interview published Tuesday in Yahoo Entertainment. “You know, we’ve lost so many cast members, you couldn’t reboot it because it won’t be the same show.

Related: Ray Romano doesn’t want an Everybody Loves Raymond American reboot: ‘I’m just a little protective’

During its nine-season run, from 1996 to 2005, the CBS sitcom about sports columnist Ray Barone and his life with his family in Long Island, N.Y., racked up 15 wins at the Emmy Awards. Heaton portrayed Ray’s wife, Debra Barone, alongside Brad Garrett and late actors including Doris Roberts and Peter

The show’s creator, Phil Rosenthal, said in July 2021 that he had pitched a reunion of the cast in the vein of the Friends special to “a couple of different places,” but he’d had “no takers.”

Heaton had just as much love for The Middle, the ABC show on which she played Frankie Heck, the mother in a family struggling to get by in the Midwest. Neil Flynn, Eden Sher, Charlie McDermott, and Atticus Shaffer costarred. While the sitcom originally aired from 2009 to 2018, just like the other, it has lived on in reruns and streaming.

Heaton herself still has a lot of love for the finale, which involved a time jump.

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“The way they wrapped it up, where we got to flash-forward in the lives of the Heck family and see where they all ended up, it was so beautiful,” Heaton said, “and I think people have such a good feeling about the show.”

Heaton said she’s noticed members of the younger generation are checking it out now, after hearing about it from an unexpected source.

“The Middle is having such a resurgence on TikTok, of all places, that kids are rediscovering or discovering it for the first time,” Heaton said. “It’s a beautiful thing. It’s like a great work of art — you don’t need to go in there and touch it up or change it or do anything to it. Just let it be what it is. And the wonderful thing about TV and about streaming [is] you’ll be able to enjoy it as much as you want.”