Phil Rosenthal might have never made Everybody Loves Raymond if he hadn't fallen asleep on a 300-year-old bed

CBC

03-07-2025

Before he created his long-running sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, Phil Rosenthal was a broke New York City theatre student who worked a number of odd jobs, like managing a deli and patrolling The Metropolitan Museum of Art as a security guard on the graveyard shift.
Though he couldn't have known it at the time, his brief stint working at New York's largest art museum would have a significant impact on his future career as a TV writer — and it all has to do with how he got fired.
"I thought I could stay up at night and have another job during the day, probably a theatre job that didn't pay anything," Rosenthal recalls in a live on-stage conversation with Q 's Tom Power at the Banff World Media Festival.
"On the third day without sleep, I did not report back to my post after doing a route. I was asleep and they found me asleep in a period room, which was a replica of a 300-year-old room with [an antique] bed as part of the exhibit. And that's where they found me — on that bed."
WATCH | Phil Rosenthal's full interview with Tom Power:
In addition to losing three days of sleep, Rosenthal says he was also on cold medication that made him drowsy. When he saw the bed, he thought it'd be a good idea to lay down for a few minutes. But when he didn't return to his post after an hour and a half, museum staff started looking for him, concerned that maybe a crime was being committed (art thefts are often inside jobs).
"I'm drooling on the pillow of this thing and I just remember looking up at this lady supervisor and thinking, 'How did she get in my room?'" he says. "The museum frowns on you touching the art, let alone sleeping on it. And so I was fired. It was the most humiliating thing that ever happened to me."
Several years later, Rosenthal was living in Hollywood, trying to make it as an actor, but not having much luck. When his friend asked him if he'd like to collaborate on a spec script for the show Roseanne, he knew exactly what the story should be about.
"John Goodman's character, the dad, they need extra money, and he gets a night job working as the night guard at the local museum and he falls asleep on a 300-year-old bed," Rosenthal explains. "We write this script. And people all over town read it and go, 'What an imagination!' And we got hired instantly on a sitcom."
Today, Rosenthal's advice to emerging writers is simple. "Write as specifically as you can," he says. "Specificity is the key to being universal."