The Wedding Pt. 1

Everybody Loves Raymond - The Complete Second Season
Raymond, his wife Debra, and their three kids live across the street from Ray's meddling parents and divorced brother. The parents go in and out of Ray and Debra's house as they please. Although probably not as funny as the third season, this season is still a solid one. The supporting staff (Patricia Heaton, Brad Garrett, Peter Boyle, and Doris Roberts) are often funnier than Ray Romano! A generous season with 25 episodes.

1. Ray's on TV: Ray gets a chance to appear on a sports chat show.

2. Father Knows Least: Ray uses a new technique that he learned in parenting class on his parents.

3. Brother: Ray and Robert go out on the anniversary of Robert's divorce.

4. Mozart: Ray tries to teach Ally a lesson about quitting piano.

5. Golf: Ray feels guilty after he tricks Debra into letting him play golf.

6. Anniversary: At his parent's 40th wedding anniversary celebration, Ray learns that his parents were once...

a fun season for fans to revisit
As with any successful television series with as many seasons as Everybody Loves Raymond, it is always fun to revisit episodes like these. The characters are still not quite as heavily developed as they were around Season 3 (and it really wasn't until Season 4 until they truly took off), but it is still a nice step up from Season 1 and contains some fresh, funny episodes that all fans will love.

These earliest seasons of ELR focus a lot more on Ray and Debra and their young family. The kids probably appear in this season a lot more than they do later on, and it's fun to see how Ray and Debra battled with juggling three such little kids. They were also considerably nicer to each other back in these days, and episodes like "Marie's Meatballs" and "The Letter" are hilarious because at this point, Debra still has not quite grasped how manipulative and crazy her overbearing mother-in-law can be. Believe it or not, there actually was a point in the series where Debra truly...

The sky was the limit
In its second season the show was moved to its familiar 9:30/8:30 central timeslot and focused mainly on fleshing out the characters more thoroughly. The early rivalry between Debra and Marie can be seen in the episodes "Marie's Meatballs" and "The Letter", while Ray and Robert get on each others nerves in "Brother" and "The Ride Along". Writer Tucker Cawley (who eventually won a writing Emmy for the season seven episode, "Baggage") writes two of the season's worst episodes. Cawley was always a natural storyteller more so than a comedian and it took him a few seasons before he was able to integrate quality jokes into his plot driven scripts, which he does successfully in "Good Girls". The season opener has jokes that only an English professor could appreciate while "Civil War" is your typical "son looking for acceptance from his father" story.

"T-Ball" is an underrated episode and Traffic Cop Timmy makes a memorable appearance in "Traffic School", painting Robert as a...

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