The TV comedy “Everybody Loves Raymond,” starring Ray Romano, was on the air for nine seasons receiving more than 70 Emmy nominations and taking home two for best comedy. The show's creator and executive producer Phil Rosenthal has written a book about the experience, “You're Lucky You're Funny.” Here's an excerpt:

Here’s a little insight about “the process [of writing a television pilot].” I don’t think worrying is necessarily a bad thing. Maybe shows and movies and the quality of a lot of other things would be better if people worried about them a little more...is what I told myself to stop from worrying about worrying. Here was my biggest worry: What did I have that the other sitcom writers didn’t? I had the very funny Ray [Romano] and his family, but I didn’t really know them. And then I realized what I had: I had my own experience.

I had my wife. I had my parents. I had the Fruit-of-the-Month Club story.

If that story hadn’t gotten some laughs from the guests at my brother’s wedding, I might not have had the confidence to put it into the script. It just happened to be a pretty good, economical illustration of how nuts “Ray’s” parents were, and what Ray and Debra were going to be up against across the street.

But the key was that specificity. I didn’t know it then, but I learned that this was the universal element. If I had tried to hit everybody with a vague example, I would’ve missed everybody. What I stumbled onto was that each of our lives deals in specifics, and we relate to that specificity in other people’s lives. For example, people still tell me that they can’t give a gift to their parents without it blowing up in their faces. And, even crazier, they’ve had that exact experience with their parents and the Fruit-of-the-Month Club. So I’m very happy that so many people are out of their minds, and we can all laugh, or cry, together.

That story served as the second act complication in the script, where Ray comes over to lie to his parents about why they won’t all be celebrating Debra’s birthday together this year. He says that he’s taking Debra and the kids to Bear Mountain (which is close to where I grew up in Rockland), but before he can get to that lie, the fruit tragedy lets us know this isn’t going to be easy for Raymond. Ever.

Other details from our actual lives were also liberally sprinkled around that pilot script—Ray’s father really did change the outgoing message on Ray and his wife, Anna’s, answering machine, causing Anna, in real life, to cry.

Ray’s father also enjoyed sniffing the heads of babies, claiming he could “suck in their youth.” Ray’s brother, Richard, on whom Robert is loosely based, actually has the habit of touching food to his chin before eating it, and really did say in a jealous moment, “It never ends for Raymond. Everybody loves Raymond.”

My wife and I occasionally speak to each other in a manner reminiscent of the way Ray and Debra speak to each other. And so do Ray and Anna, and, happily, so do you and your whoever.

The rest of the story—the situation, dialogue, other character traits, and relationships—were made up, but the point is, I had enough real life in there to make it feel like real life. And in January 1996, when I was about to hand in the pilot script, I thought it might also be funny. But I certainly wasn’t sure, so I sent my first draft to Jeremy Stevens. Jeremy is about twenty years older than I and has a great eye and ear. He was one of the creators of The Electric Company, he worked on Fernwood 2-Night and Saturday Night Live, and we were army buddies. By “army” I mean we had both survived Baby Talk. But I wasn’t sending Jeremy the script because of his impressive credentials; I was sending him the first pilot script I ever wrote on my own because he was the sweetest guy I knew. Whatever he had to say, he’d at least say it nicely. Jeremy didn’t disappoint.

The first words I heard from him when I picked up the phone were: “We’ll be on for ten years!” He was very excited.

It turns out he was wrong, we were only on for nine years, but I’ll never forget his enthusiasm and friendship (he’s not dead, I just appreciate him), which sustained me over some of the rough times to come.

The network liked the script enough to call the pilot a go but of course that implied a casting contingent go, which means it wasn’t a go unless we could find a cast the network would approve. So I was assigned a casting director, Lisa Miller, and she started bringing me people to see as if I was a producer.

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