Not Everbody Loves Raymond

Cafe Society
21

I agree with everything on your list except Cheers and the first season of In Living Color. Cheers had some of the sharpest dialogue of any comedy, and ranks for me in the top 5 sitcoms of all time. I much prefered the Shelly Long years to the Kirstie Alley ones, but Cheers managed to maintain most of its comedic strength throughout.

Friends I hated with a passion.

Speaking of In Living Color, what is it with sketch comedy shows? I haven’t seen a single good one since early-90s (and some would put it back even further) Saturday Night Live. Mad TV sucks. The Sketch Show sucks. Blue Collar TV sucks. I absolutely adore sketch comedy, but there ain’t a good one out there.

22

Saturday Night Live still has great moments, but in general, their cast is far funnier and better than the material they are presented with. Most of the individual personalities are terrific and every so often they get a chance to shine, but too often the sketches drag on too long and embarrass everyone involved.

I miss The State, The Ben Stiller Show, and of course Mr. Show.

23

I truly wanted to like Married With Children, because I like Katey Seagal, but I could never stomach the show. It seemed to consist of stupid, selfish, shallow people insulting each other intertwined with toilet and B.O. jokes. Asinine!

And yes, I hate ELR, too. I never watched it at home, but once on an airline flight we were subjected to episodes and outtakes from the show. Whatta bunch of stinking tripe.

For contrast, I’ll list the shows I do like, so we can see how we line up in the TV show taste categories:

Frasier
Seinfeld
Futurama
The Simpsons
Monk

24

I have never never ever watched one single episode.

I get the feeling I didn’t miss much.

25

I think the key to ELR is that it’s a show about a bunch of truly awful people. If you go in not expecting to feel sympathetic for any character, you can kind of enjoy the carnage. Plus, I have to admire Doris Roberts for her amazing portrayal of the ultimate passive-agressive bitch.

Other shows (Fawlty Towers springs to mind) have done the “no sympathetic character” thing about a million times better, but ELR has its moments. I liked the ep where they played “chicken” over unpacking a suitcase, and there was a great sight gag involving Robert’s police uniform and his girlfriend.

However, two half episodes of Will & Grace convinced me not to try again.

Unfortunately, I don’t get why people are so enamored of Arrested Development - maybe I just caught a bad episode?

26

Here is Yahoo’s Ratings Page, which at the time of this posting, is showing the Nielsen top 20 for April 11-18:

  1. CSI: I don’t like it. Not at all. The amin trouble I have with it is the same trouble I have with many other shows about a particular profession: characters whose job takes a severe backseat to their personal dramas. People who spend that much time in real life talking about the soap opera they’ve turned their lives into rather than doing their jobs are people I hope get fired. Why would I want to watch them on TV, given that it undermines my ability to suspend disbelief and get absorbed in the show? That, andthe idea that the CSI team is present at various arrests. It just doesn’t make any sense.

  2. Desperate Housewives: My wife loved this show when it started, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t peer at it frequently, but we’ve stopped watching. The slow plot pace they’ve tried to maintain has required a metastasization of the number of characters to keep anything happening. IT’s just another soap opera now.

3-4: American Idol We loved the first series, tuned in occasionally to the second, and more or less skipped the third. This time around it’s appointment television. It all depends on the quality of the talent pool, I guess, and this seasons has a deep bench.

5: CSI: Miami Haven’t tuned it in becuase of the CSI title.

6: Without a Trace: I have liked this show alright when I happen to catch it on, but I don’t like it enough to seek it out.

7: Grey’s Anatomy: See CSI.

8: Survivor: I have never seen the point of this show. I watched a couple of episodes of the first season, and have avoided it ever since.

9: Law and Order: How the mighty have fallen! I discovered this show in the mid-1990s, and was an avid fan (my wife became an even more rabid fan) for years. We watched every rerun on every cable channel. Then Jerry Orbach, left the show, and we lasted about 1 episode and 5 minutes into the Dennis Farina years. We watched the recent episode where Jesse Martin’s character gets shot, and only confirmed the wisdom of our decision.

10: House: As soon as Amazing Race 7 ends, I will check this show out.

11: Two and a Half Men: I should hate this show, I have every reason to, but I just caught part of another episode last night, and thought it was alright. But I don’t seek it out.

12: Everybody Loves Raymond: Not me. Not even a little.

13: Revelations Good. Lord. No.

14: NCIS I catch the last couple of minutes of this everytime I tape Amazing Race. That’s about all I can stand. Talk about overblown.

15: Cold Case: Haven’t checked it out.

16: Law & Order: Trial by Jury: The death of Jerry Orbach cast a pall over this show that has not enabled us to watch it.

17: 60 Minutes: Grew up on it, still love it. And it seems to be on an upswing right now in terms of quality.

18: Apprentice: The “reality” version of the same problems I have with CSI. And this is office work. Do people really come home from the office to watch people in the office? That’s just sick…

19: Amazing Race 7: In case you haven’t gathered, this is the only show that, when it’s on, no one is allowed to talk to me or ask me to do anything.

20: Judging Amy: I catch a couple of minutes of this when I tape Amazin Race too. Nothing has made me sorry the VCR switched off.

27

I hate:

  • Friends
  • Cheers
  • Everybody Loves Raymond
  • Seinfeld
  • The Honeymooners
  • The Beverly Hillbillies
  • Married With Children
  • Anything with Lucy in it except I Love Lucy
28

I know why I hate Raymond. I nearly ended up in the same situation as his poor wife. Specifically, I’d have had the mother-in-law from the depths of hell, and the spineless husband to go along with her. Not funny at all in real life. Trust me on that.

29

I don’t totally hate Raymond, I think it’s occasionally funny, but I rarely watch it. As opposed to some other posters, it’s not Raymond’s parents that bother me (I actually think they provide most of the few funny moments), it’s the extremely mean-spirited fighting between Ray and his wife. Spousal fighting can be funny; I laugh my head off when Doug and Carrie go at it in King of Queens. But with them it’s clearly unrealistic fighting, scripted to be funny. With Ray and his wife, it seems too realistic to me, and very, very nasty. Not funny at all.

Popular shows I hate:

Friends
The Sapranos
Friends
The Shield
Friends
Nip/Tuck
Friends
Smallville
Friends
The Amazing Race (ok, don’t really hate this one, it’s just completely boring)

And did I mention Friends?

30

I think you’ll like House, and I base this on the reason you don’t like CSI. Yes, there is personal drama in House, but the ratio of time spent only on drama to time spent on diagnosing and curing the Patient of the Week is far less than one. Furthermore, the drama is always interwoven with whatever is going on with their patient.

I’ll third (or fourth?) the disdain for so-called “reality” shows. The situations they present are not realistic, so I don’t think of them as actual reality. Besides, if I want reality, I’ll turn off the TV set, thank you very much.

That said, for the most part I have turned off the TV set. I don’t have one in my dorm.

31

I liked Raymond for a couple of years but now realize it was just that I had a crush on Debra.

As far as popular shows I dislike, pretty much any TV drama, reality show, talent show, etc. I honestly have never watched through an episode of Hillstreet Blues, ER, Law & Order, etc. They just seem like a waste to me, getting all involved in someone else’s life, real or imagined.

We’ll watch comedies, sports, news and educational shows mainly.

32

Add another “I don’t like ELR” on the barby. I don’t hate or despise it, I just don’t like it.
I also don’t like “The Soprano’s”, “Deadwood” or basically anything HBO put out. Actually make that any of the cable chanels. “Nip/Tuck”, “The Shield”, “Sex in the city”. I hate them all.

Basically it’s the major networks or nothing for me.
I was born a popularist, and I’ll die a popularist.

33

Count me in on that one. Debra is one hottie, and I actually like her bitchiness and caustic wit.

34

Sometime in the past few years I somehow fell out of the habit of watching pretty much any series TV at all. The only series of any type I’ve watched regularly this season has been Battlestar Galactica and even that was starting to seriously piss me off toward the end. The presence of various hottie females has not been enough to get me to pay any attention to Desperate Houswives, which I find just another soap with pretensions, like Ally McBeal, which I actively loathed, and I’m sick to death of all the various permutations of Cops ‘n’ Docs.

Can’t stand sitcoms, can’t stand reality TV. I gave up on Friends about season five, and haven’t watched a sitcom regularly since. The only ‘reality’-type show I ever gave a toss about was Junkyard Wars and that seems to be gone for good. There is nothing I can think of that would convince me to watch even a second of something like American Idol – for one thing, I’ve never had much interest in solo song ‘n’ dance, which I gather is the only sort of thing displayed on that show.

So, easier to say what I do watch rather than what I hate: Movies, some baseball, occasionally NASCAR, shows about interesting structures or other bits of technology, some natural-history type stuff, sci-fi on the exceedingly rare occasion that there is decent televised sci-fi, the Weather Channel, and that’s about it. You can assume I hate everything else.

[meta-Kabong]

Jeepers, what a crusty old grump you’re becoming…

[/meta-Kabong]

35

In no particular order:

Frasier: “Let’s take a one-dimensional supporting character from a good ensemble show and send him out on his own! It’ll be comic gold!”

Will & Grace: “Hey, it’s easier to make jokes using homosexual stereotypes if we make some of the main characters gay!”

Just Shoot Me: “The Mary Tyler Moore Show premise was good, but wouldn’t it be better if all our actors and writers sucked?”

24: “Where every place important can be driven to in 10 minutes, and a crisis happens every hour, on the hour.”

The Sopranos (after season 2): “Oh look - another nice and interesting character got killed, and Tony still has anger management issues he’s not dealing with.”

36

Family Guy: It’s like The Simpsons, but without being funny.

CSI: It’s like Law and Order, but without being smart, interesting or well-written.

Will and Grace: The entire show is one long gay joke, which is repeated over the course of every episode.

37

Oh, do I hate FRIENDS… Wasn’t there a Simpsons Episode, where the family sits down and watches the hit series, “Don’t Go There!” (mcok of Friends)… now that was funny. Friends is just terrible. I hate it!

I generally don’t watch enough TV to know whether or not most of the shows listed are any good. I presume they are mostly all crap. Raymond is so recycled. I pray that if I ever get married, my wife and I won’t act like that.

I did use to make fun of my roomate, who watched “Ed”. I think he’s hated me ever since.

Now, how can anyone hate the Andy Griffith Show (black and white version only - I never watched color)???

38

I found the Andy Griffith Show to be the ultimate in bland pablum. Maybe I’m too young, maybe it helps to be from Middle America, but those homespun lessons, small-town lifestyles, and “gosh-darn” attitude come across to me as hopelessly hokey, sad, and better forgotten. It’s like eating meat and potatoes after boiling them for days and days until all the flavor is gone and they’re all the same mushy consistency.

39

Gee whiz Lou, I like my gosh-darn attitude. I mean, sometimes when things aren’t so swell, you just have to say “Gosh darnit to HECK!”

40

I don’t mind “Everybody Loves Raymond”, but I like the older episodes better than the last few seasons. The ones where Deb seems to become as insane as Ray’s parents.

As for “CSI”, I can see why people dislike it but I like it simply because, for once, there’s a show set in Vegas that doesn’t focus on hookers or drug dealers and actually is filmed in areas of town other than The Strip. I always thought of it as “CSI: Or What Would Happen If Will Graham From ‘Red Dragon/Manhunter’ Moved to Vegas”.

Popular shows I hate:

“Will & Grace”: I have a theory that this show will be seen as the “black minstrel show” of it’s day in the future. Nobody else agrees with me.

“Friends”: I see it as a watered-down friendly rip-off of “Seinfeld” for sensitive clueless people. After all, it did premiere when “Seinfeld” was at the height of it’s popularity. Unlike most copy-cat shows, it managed to become popular. Ugh.