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[ J O Y C E_.M I L L M A N__O N_.T E L E V I S I O N ]___ _______"Everybody Loves Raymond" is a family sitcom -- _______but it's not about the kids. Look, I know you're afraid of family sitcoms. And you should be. "Family Ties," "Growing Pains," "Home Improvement" -- they've put discerning viewers off an entire genre, with their hammered-home pieties and bland faux-realism and insufferable camera-hogging kid actors. I mean, many of us won't even consider watching a sitcom about a human family anymore: aliens from outer space ("3rd Rock from the Sun") or animated characters ("The Simpsons," "King of the Hill," "Rugrats") are about all we can deal with. So, it's understandable if you've been avoiding (or ignoring) CBS's "Everybody Loves Raymond." It's a sitcom about a family that's not a cartoon. But, I promise you, this is one really good sitcom about a family that's not a cartoon. Made for David Letterman's Worldwide Pants production company (that should tell you something right there), the smart, quirky and very funny "Everybody Loves Raymond" stars stand-up comic Ray Romano and Patricia Heaton as a middle-class, suburban, un-yuppified Long Island couple named Ray and Debra Barone. He's a sportswriter, she's a full-time mother -- they have twin toddler sons and a 6-year-old daughter. The setup and plots are straight out of the family sitcom playbook, but the show is crafted with a neat, subversive kick. "It's not really about the kids," Romano explained conspiratorially, looking straight into the camera, in the opening credits of the show's first season in 1996. Let me emphasize that: It's not really about the kids. Oh, there's much evidence of children in the toy-strewn and high-chair laden Barone household, but the kids are used very sparingly on screen -- they're usually at Grandma's, or at the park, or napping. Of course, many of the episodes center on predicaments that Ray and Debra wouldn't be in if they didn't have kids (my favorite: combustible Debra gets into a Little League beef for providing the team with an "unapproved" snack). But on "Everybody Loves Raymond," these predicaments are used to trigger the hidden land mines in the Barone marriage, and usually it's the easygoing Ray who has to watch where he treads. "Everybody Loves Raymond" is interested in how a marriage, and the people in it, get knocked around by (and survive) parenthood. "Raymond" is also interested in the family baggage that seems to get heavier, not lighter, as you get older. With the darkest, most idiosyncratic sense of humor this side of "Seinfeld," "Everybody Loves Raymond" zeroes in on a relationship under siege. Ray's meddlesome parents and his goofy unmarried brother live too close for comfort, right across the street. Bickering Marie and Frank Barone (played with gusto by Doris Roberts and Peter Boyle) barge in uninvited at all hours and provide a mordant glimpse of marriage as a stew pot of homicidal impulses. Ray's giant doofus of an older brother, police officer Robert (Brad Garrett, the new Fred Gwynne), is hilariously consumed with jealousy over Ray's "perfect" life. Ray and Debra have a sex problem, too -- as in, they're hardly having any because she's too tired after being home with three kids all day. And most of all, they have a very realistic marital power struggle going on -- usually because scrappy Debra wants them to do something difficult (like tell Marie to butt out), but skittish Ray wants to avoid the issue entirely. This is the way they fight: Debra bombards Ray with smart bombs of withering sarcasm, followed by silent looks of contempt. Ray adopts a hangdog expression and makes himself appear as pathetic as possible ("You're so great with the kids, you know what to do ... If it were up to me, they'd be eating cereal for dinner and wearing the boxes"), until Debra takes pity on him. Their spats end mostly in draws. You'd have to go back to "The Dick Van Dyke Show" -- the first family sitcom for adults -- to find a show as knowing about husbands and wives, and as deft a blend of insight and belly laughs (prepare to lose it whenever Boyle is onscreen). The most interesting thing about "Everybody Loves Raymond" is that it speaks equally to male and female viewers without coming off as compromised. Maybe because the writing/producing staff, headed by creator Philip Rosenthal, consists of both men and women, Ray and Debra hold up as equally credible, sympathetic and often pigheaded characters -- unlike, say, "Mad About You," or, better yet, "thirtysomething," which seem to be filtered through a male perspective even when focusing on female characters. "Everybody Loves Raymond" is the yin-yangiest show on TV -- no wonder CBS has had such a hard time figuring out how to promote it, and who to promote it to. The first time you watch "Everybody Loves Raymond," you might think Debra is overly harsh, especially when she humors the neurotic Ray to his face, then mutters "idiot" when he's out of earshot. But the more you watch it, you see that Debra and Ray are pals underneath it all, and their humor -- her crabby jibes and his self-deprecating cracks about their boring post-kids life -- is what keeps them together. Debra is just the type of partner Ray needs to buck him up. There's a hilarious, no-holds-barred grudge match going on between Debra and her overbearing mother-in-law, but the joke is that the two women are more alike -- strong, decisive, sharp-tongued -- than anybody would like to admit. Ray's being attracted to Debra is the equivalent of fighting a wildfire with a controlled burn: without Debra's snappy provocations to counter the effects of Marie's smothering, the vastly insecure Ray (he thinks he's not handsome enough, he thinks he's over the hill, he's convinced that Debra only married him for the wedding), would be, well, still living with his parents. (In the Barone family, moving across the street qualifies as a heroic achievement.) With her dark, twinkling eyes and deliciously sarcastic delivery, Heaton is the perfect counterpoint to the wary, slow-talking Romano (he's like Jerry Seinfeld with a busted gearshift). She's every stay-at-home mom who ever woke up one day and suddenly realized that she used to be cool, but now she's serving up the turkey dogs and going all-out to show her hypercritical mother-in-law that she can get her whites whiter. Debra may appear more self-confident than Ray, but she's plagued by a gnawing sense of inadequacy. And in a more obvious way, so is Ray. When you watch "Everybody Loves Raymond" and key in to Ray's perspective, the show becomes a psychodrama-dipped comedy about a guy caught in the universal male boomer bind -- trying to face the conflicting demands of being a manly man at work (what could be a manlier career than sportswriting?) and a nurturing father/sensitive partner at home. "Everybody Loves Raymond" is the thinking man's "Home Improvement" -- it's about, and for, men (like all-thumbs Ray) who feel intimidated by power tools and pig snorts. Like Rob Petrie in "The Dick Van Dyke Show," Ray is a nice guy who feels uneasy in his role of sole provider and all-around king of the hill. He doesn't want to make waves with Debra. He just wants to go to work, watch sports, play with the kids, drop in on Ma for some comfort food (Debra is an indifferent cook) and, basically, pretend that nothing much has changed now that he's an adult. It's a nice fantasy. But reality interferes, and Ray is always trying to meet some '90s-dad obligation that his own macho father teases him for, or trying to read Debra's confusing emotional states and signals, or trying not to look like a wuss in front of his work buddies (bring home friends to watch the fight on the night of Debra's Tupperware party? I think not). The poor guy just wants to get through a day without being yelled at. In every episode of "Everybody Loves Raymond," there's a scene where Ray and Debra are getting ready for bed and one of them is an emotional mess, obsessing over some (imagined) proof of their incompetence and generally falling apart. The other one has to come up with some words of wisdom on the fly to make things better. These reassurances, the adult equivalent of soothing bedtime stories, are part common sense, part nonsense and part voodoo. When Debra frets that she's uninteresting because she's not eccentric like Ray's family, he spins out a convoluted rationale about how she's the real eccentric, because only a truly weird person would choose to marry into his family. When Ray worries that he's getting shorter, Debra gives him Odor Eaters for his shoes to add a quarter inch of height. With the surest of comic touches, "Everybody Loves Raymond" captures the unspoken, but most important, vow of marriage: I will believe in you, even when I can't believe in myself. SALON | July 3, 1998