RECOVERING PESSIMIST is a Season One episode of the sitcom series Everybody Loves Raymond, first airing in 1997. I myself had never taken to this series although Melissa liked it and my mother had meticulously taped every episode she saw, stacks of labeled VHS tapes lining the wall in her Hollywood, Florida home. The other night we had the television tuned in to TV Land, and they were showing a sequence of Raymond episodes...including the one I'm featuring. In this episode Ray (Ray Romano) is nominated for Sports Writer of the Year, but his habitual pessimism warns him not to even bother attending the awards banquet...his wife Debra (played by Patricia Heaton) coaxes him into showing up anyway. Although all that is happening seems to contradict Ray's negative frame of mind toward everything, he refuses to relent until Debra finally convinces him to adopt a more positive, optimistic attitude. Ray then goes next door to present his new, shinier outlook to his mother, father, and brother...and then gets a big dose of why he had become such a pessimist in the first place. Although there are probably a few funnier episodes in this nine-year series, I picked this one because of Ray's negative next-door experience with his childhood family. For myself, I've noticed in a number of diverse social situations over the years where I would enter them with a very upbeat, optimistic mindset only to be practically knocked off my feet by the overwhelmingly dark, oppressive atmosphere around me. And it's true: if you have spent a great deal of your early life surrounded by others hell-bent on spinning the events of their lives and others' in derisive, angry or frightened terms, then like Ray in this hilarious episode you'll possibly adopt a similar attitude. By the way, my favorite character in Everybody Loves Raymond is Ray's policeman brother Robert, superbly portrayed by Brad Garrett...
No comments:
Post a Comment