This is a pre-staked attendee-report template for the Everybody Loves Raymond 30-year reunion panel at ATX TV Festival 2026. We’ll be in the audience as fans, attending with regular festival passes. On the day, this page fills in with our notes from the room and a quote round-up from the stage — within 48 hours of the panel.
This is the second of two CBS-broadcast retrospectives in seven months for the show: the November 24 90-minute primetime special drew 6.32M live-same-day viewers and 10.08M L+7; the December 22 Part 2 followed. The ATX panel is the long-form, on-the-record conversation that the broadcast specials didn’t have time for.
The November/December 2025 CBS specials reunited Romano with Patricia Heaton, Brad Garrett, Monica Horan, and the Sweeten siblings on a recreated Barone living-room set, honoring late cast members Peter Boyle, Doris Roberts, and Sawyer Sweeten. The ATX panel adds the writers’ room conversation that didn’t make either broadcast.
Opening notes from inside the Austin venue — the crowd, the warm-up, the moment Romano and Rosenthal took the stage.
Rosenthal’s set-piece: watching Romano on Letterman in May 1995, getting hired by Worldwide Pants, meeting at Art’s Deli. Filled in with the version told from the ATX stage.
For thirty years the show has been described as “90% real.” The ATX panel is the long-form chance to hear which 10% wasn’t.
The hardest section of the November special was the tribute to Boyle on what would have been his 90th birthday. The ATX panel will return to it; the report records what gets said.
Romano at the November taping: “We’re never going to do one, because we’re missing three castmembers, three family members.” The ATX panel almost certainly re-asks the question; the answer is captured here.
This attendee report stands alongside our pre-panel 30-year retrospective on the show itself, with a dozen quoted sources from the CBS specials, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Variety, TV Insider, and IMDb.
Source discipline. Every quote in the final report attributed to the speaker on stage; no off-the-record material published without prior agreement.
Audience-attendance disclosure. Fans in the room, regular festival passes — not credentialed press in 2026. The report is the public record of what was said from the stage.
Filing window.