Ray Romano has no interest in rebooting his sitcom

Everyone’s going wild for the new Frasier, which is apparently actually good and not just some kind of weird meme joke or inexplicable fanservice to an audience that we can’t believe exists, but one classic sitcom star isn’t sufficiently impressed by the new-ish wave of rebooting old TV shows to fill desperate TV networks’ increasingly barren schedules with something—anything—with some built-in appeal. Appearing on Real Time With Bill Maher (via Variety), Ray Romano effectively shot down any chance at a reboot or a revival of Everybody Loves Raymond.

Romano had a couple of good reasons for this, also: For one, he says these reboots are “never as good” as the originals, and he doesn’t want to tarnish the “legacy” of his show. Also, 40 percent of the original show’s core cast is dead, with Romano indicating that you simply can’t do the show without them: “It’s now out of the question,” he told Bill Maher, “because unfortunately the parents are gone: Peter Boyle and Doris Roberts.”

Everybody Loves Raymond ran from 1996 to 2005 and starred Romano as a sportswriter living with his wife (Patricia Heaton) across the street from his overbearing Italian-American parents (Boyle, who died in 2006, and Roberts, who died in 2016), plus his brother Robert (Brad Garrett, who is still with us). No offense to the deceased, but it would be possible to do a version of the show without Raymond’s parents—him and Debra moved somewhere else just like Frasier, boom, you’re done—but he’s probably right that it wouldn’t be as good. Nobody was tuning in to that show to see Raymond not get into dramatic Oedipal arguments with his mother while his father sat in a recliner and shouted at them. Oh, you were really invested in Raymond’s career as a sportswriter? As if you would’ve even remember that part of it without us telling you.

So yeah, it’s not happening. But still, Nobody Loves Robert, a spin-off about Brad Garrett’s character that we just invented, could still happen.