Like many of the best sitcoms, Everybody Loves Raymond revolved around situations that mirrored real life. Despite having different backgrounds, series creator Philip Rosenthal and star Ray Romano found that they had similar experiences of having loud, crazy families. They wanted to make a series that featured those small moments; the meddling in-laws, the dinner table spouse disputes, the running around that comes with having kids.

The series pilot revolves around Debra (Patricia Heaton) wanting a birthday party without Ray's parents visiting for once. When Ray goes across the street to reluctantly tell his parents, he gets drawn into a discussion about the birthday gift he got his own mother: a subscription to the fruit-of-the-month club.

The scene that follows is one of the episode's funniest moments as Marie gets more and more distraught about the onslaught of fruit, wailing that "I can't talk, there's too much fruit in the house!"

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That quote, as well as the whole fruit-of-the-month debacle, came right from Rosenthal's own life.

In a 2005 interview with Newsday, Rosenthal confirmed that particular scene happened with him as the unfortunate gifter. "She reacts as if it's a box of plutonium. That actually happened with me. I was the idiot. I had to apologize for the gift."

Rosenthal added that he felt no need to exaggerate. "We found that the truth was usually good enough."

In fact, in a 2006 interview with The Kansas City Star, Rosenthal said that he made sure those true stories kept coming. How? He gave his writers normal working hours.

That way, they could "go home, get into fights, then come to work and tell us about them."