Fans of Everybody Loves Raymond know that most of the episodes are based on real events from the lives of Romano, Rosenthal, and many of the show’s writers. After nine seasons, material started becoming scarce. Rosenthal also didn’t want to cause discord by continuing to air everyone’s actual family quirks and marital arguments each week.
“We ran out of ideas,” Rosenthal revealed. “If you worked for me, I would say to you, ‘Go home, get in a fight with your wife, and come back in and tell me about it.’ And then we’d have a show. But after nine years, if we kept that up, our wives would leave us. And in California, that’s half. So we made sure that we got out before that happened.”
Another factor that attributed to the unanimous decision to end after nine seasons was making the choice before it became a request.
“We also wanted to get off the air before somebody said, ‘Hey, you should go off the air,’” Rosenthal explained. “You want to get off the stage before you wear out your welcome. And we actually cared enough about our audience to want to go before we became lousy. … we wanted to leave before we hit that level.”
