Sounds like Ray Romano wants a job at Cracked. That’s as good an explanation as any for why the Everybody Loves Raymond star has decided to do a deep dive into his titular sitcom’s past, rating all 210 episodes on a scale of 1 to 100.
“I got on a little kick there. I hadn’t seen the episodes (in a while),” he told PEOPLE. “They took on a new look to me. I was appreciating them more. I was very hard on them back then.” But with a decade or two of hindsight under his belt, “I felt like an audience member. And then I said, ‘Let me rate them.’ I rated them, and I was hard on some.”
While Romano rated all of his work on that 1 to 100 scale, no episode rated a perfect one-hundred score — or a 99, 98 or 97 for that matter. Ninety-six was as high as the comic was willing to go since “we were never perfect.”
Which episodes got torpedoed in Romano’s ratings? He ain’t saying. After all, “I still have dinner with the writers,” he explains, “and I’ve written a bunch myself.”
Over the course of several seasons, quality is going to run the gamut. “When you do 210 episodes, you’re going to have episodes that you think are brilliant,” Romano says, “and you’re going to have episodes that you think, ‘Wow, you know what? We kind of missed it on that one.’”
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“Then you’re going to have episodes that are very good, great and somewhere in the middle, you know what I mean? That’s just to be expected when you’re cranking an episode out every week.”
Okay, fine — if Romano won’t tell us which episodes sucked the most, which ones got his high score of 96? Three qualified, he said. The terrific trio include:
Good Girls, a Season Two episode in which Marie (Doris Roberts) likes Amy (Monica Horan) better than Debra (Patricia Heaton).
She’s the One, a Season Seven installment where Ray discovers that Robert’s (Brad Garrett) new girlfriend has a thing for eating flies. “It’s bizarre and crazy,” Romano admits, “but it ended up being a great episode.”
Baggage, another Season Seven episode in which Ray and Debra have a three-week squabble over who should haul a suitcase up the stairs, earning Everybody Loves Raymond the Emmy for outstanding writing for a comedy series.
As for the rest of the list? Drop Cracked a line, Ray — we’d love to publish the entire rundown.
