Sadly, as the way we watch TV has changed, with streaming taking over our daily lives, so has the type of TV shows we watch. It used to be that sitcoms ruled the airwaves, all the way up through the 90s with Seinfeld and Friends, and the 2000s with Everybody Loves Raymond and The King of Queens. These were simple looking shows with a laugh track that we could lose ourselves in at the end of a stressful day, and decades later, thanks to those aforementioned streaming services, still do.
The King of Queens, starring Kevin James, Leah Remini, and Jerry Stiller, ran on CBS for an impressive nine seasons, filling the emptiness left by Seinfeld‘s exit (and allowing Stiller to keep showing how much of a comedic genius he was), and sharing space with another CBS sitcom, Everybody Loves Raymond. For most of us, the first time we ever saw Kevin James was when he appeared in a few early episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond as Ray Barone’s (Ray Ramano) friend. Shortly after, James got a series of his own, and for years, many articles stressed how The King of Queens was a spinoff of Everybody Loves Raymond. There’s just one problem with that: it wasn’t. In fact, Collider has the scoop from series co-creator, Michael J. Weithorn. Thanks to the information he provided to us, it’s time to set the record straight and acknowledge The King of Queens for the original creation that it was.
Most People Think ‘The King of Queens’ Is an ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ Spinoff
Many of our favorite sitcoms started as spinoffs from another show. If you were a TGIF fan as a kid, Steve Urkel (Jaleel White) was the star of Family Matters, but did you know the series started as a spinoff of Perfect Strangers, with Harriette Winslow (Jo Marie Payton) co-starring in a small but lovable role as an elevator operator at the newspaper Balki (Bronson Pinchot) and Larry (Mark Linn-Baker) work at? A more well known example is that Frasier is a spinoff of Cheers, with Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) often spending his time at the Boston bar before moving to Seattle.
Kevin James wasn’t a big star until The King of Queens, but as most of us remember it, that series first started on Everybody Loves Raymond, where James played Ray’s friend, a delivery driver named Doug Heffernan. CBS was so impressed with James in the role that they decided to spin off the character into his own series, right? That’s what so many articles say online, and it’s what I believed as well. Everybody Loves Raymond is one of my top two or three favorite shows of all time, and I was certain that’s what had happened. It’s not. Perhaps it’s a little bit of the Mandela Effect going on, where the majority believe something is true even though it never happened. Just like we’re certain that Sinbad was once in a movie called Shazaam, we know Doug was on Everybody Loves Raymond.
The King of Queens co-creator Michael J. Weithorn has a theory about how we all came to believe this. Weithorn told Collider that he didn’t know this misconception was so pervasive until he was listening to a podcast a few years ago where the guest spoke about The King of Queens being an Everybody Loves Raymond spinoff. This wouldn’t be out of the norm, except that the guest was Laurie Zaks, an executive with CBS who began covering The King of Queens in its second season! If she thought the spinoff story was true, why wouldn’t the rest of us? Weithorn acknowledged that there were several contributing factors to this theory. Not only had Kevin James appeared in a few episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond, but both sitcoms are set in Long Island with “strong New York ‘voices,'” and in some The King of Queens episodes, Ray Romano, Doris Roberts, and Peter Boyle all showed up as their Everybody Loves Raymond characters.
Because of this, Weithorn says, “It’s possible that those crossovers helped ingrain the idea that the two shows were somehow connected in a broader way.” If you want to put that to rest, though, all you have to do is watch the crossovers, such as the early episode where Ray Barone runs into Doug Heffernan at the DMV and tries to cheat on a test. The two have a funny moment together, but it’s as strangers, not two old friends reconnecting.
How Did the Road to ‘The King of Queens’ Really Happen?
Weithorn has had a decades-long career in film and television. Most recently, he wrote and directed the soon-to-be-released Connescene, a film starring real-life husband and wife Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick. He has been a writer and producer for several shows, was the showrunner for the short-lived 90s series The Sinbad Show (which really did star Sinbad), and was a major contributor on Family Ties in many forms during its seven-year run. He was also the creator of several shows, but none have been more successful than The King of Queens, which he co-created with David Litt.
But how did Weithorn and Kevin James cross paths and come together to create television history? James was a standup comedian in the fall of 1997, and after a great set at the Montreal Comedy Festival the year before, he got himself a holding deal with NBC. Remember the days when networks looked for comedians to sign and turn into the next big sitcom star? James did an NBC pilot that didn’t get picked up, but at the same time, Weithorn had a deal with Sony to develop shows and was coming off the heels of the cancelation of his Fox series, Ned and Stacey. NBC sent him a VHS tape of the comedians they had deals with, and it was Kevin James that got his attention more than anyone else. Weithorn said he was drawn to James because he was a big guy who “at times goes very loud and angry with his comedy, but it’s a comedic anger, never threatening.” An excited Weithorn called the head of NBC Studios, Tom Nunan, and told him how much he liked Kevin. Nunan already had an idea for the comic too, envisioning him in a modern day Honeymooners. With that prompt, it then clicked for Weithorn to make Kevin’s character a delivery driver. Every sitcom lead needs a wife, so Weithorn modeled Carrie after his father’s secretary when Weithorn was a kid, “a very pretty gum-chomping ‘outer borough’ girl named Jeanette.”
NBC executives liked the idea, so Weithorn went off to write it, bringing in David Litt, a writer on Ned and Stacey, to co-write the pilot with him. As any fan of The King of Queens knows, though, the series aired on CBS and not NBC. That’s because NBC was turned off by the blue-collar aspect. Seinfeld and Friends were big hits at the time, with the characters living in Manhattan, yet here was this guy who was happy being a truck driver. NBC President Warren Littlefield thought that made James’ character a “loser”, but with Weithorn and Litt refusing to budge on their vision, NBC lost interest. Weithorn’s agent, Beth Uffner, then sent the script to CBS, who agreed to shoot a pilot if they could get the show away from NBC. If you love The King of Queens, say some thanks to Beth Uffner. Without her, it would never have happened.
The Belief That It Was an ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ Spin-off Hurt ‘The King of Queens’
Kevin James was in place, but The King of Queens needed a cast to support him. Leah Remini was the first choice for everyone, but they had to wait for an NBC show she was working on to be canceled before offering her the part. As for the iconic Arthur, Weithorn had first envisioned actor Ford Rainey, who he had worked with on Ned and Stacey, in the part, but fate intervened. In the spring of 1998, Seinfeld came to an end and Jerry Stiller, the genius behind George Costanza’s (Jason Alexander) loudmouthed father, Frank, was available, so they went after him hard to play Arthur. When Jerry Stiller unexpectedly dropped out, another actor, Jack Carter, was brought in, but the pilot didn’t work with him in the part. After showing Jerry Stiller the pilot, he agreed to come back. If he hadn’t, the series may have crumbled even before it started, because it’s Stiller who got the biggest laughs week after week.
The King of Queens was a huge hit for CBS, becoming a dependable Top 40 show year in and year out. Kevin James became a household name because of it, but do you know how many Emmys The King of Queens was nominated for in a near decade? One. In the final season, James was nominated for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series, a nod given more as a thank-you for the series than anything else, even though he rightfully deserved it.
The King of Queens is a hilarious sitcom filled with unforgettable characters and some of comedy’s best moments in recent memory, but it was never a critically acclaimed show. That’s probably because it was seen as being some less-than spinoff, a show based on another, which was then compared to that. Everybody Loves Raymond had more viewers, and more critics loved it, so much so that it was nominated for 69 Emmys and won 15. The King of Queens had to live in that shadow, which wasn’t fair to them. It’s especially unfair since The King of Queens wasn’t even a spinoff of Everybody Loves Raymond. According to Michael J. Weithorn, when he created the series, “At this point I had no idea that Kevin had appeared on a few episodes of Raymond. The character of Doug was created with no connection to that.” In fact, he couldn’t be, because The King of Queens was initially developed on a different network, making the spinoff idea impossible.
Weithorn says the spinoff myth diminished the stature of The King of Queens with the industry and the press, which is why they didn’t get the recognition. Maybe his series lost out on the accolades because of that, but they didn’t lose out on the fans. Audiences tuned in by the millions for 207 episodes, whether they thought the show was a spinoff or not. It was funny, which was all that mattered to them. Despite the frustration of the spinoff talk over the years, Weithorn acknowledges this, gratefully saying, “The industry didn’t pay any attention to us, but fortunately millions of viewers were paying lots of attention, and have been continuously since 1998. So – no complaints here.”
Every season of The King of Queens is available to watch on Peacock in the U.S.
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