It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Everybody loved Raymond. And now Raymond is leaving us - a mere 16 episodes left to go.

Co-creator and executive producer Phil Rosenthal brought in his ace Everybody Loves Raymond writing team for a return visit to the bi-annual TV critics tour, their first in eight years, as they prepare to say goodbye with a half-season’s worth of fresh episodes (likely to be padded out with viewer-voted classic reruns), leading up to the finale.

"I want Walter Cronkite to host it live," Rosenthal joked of his plans for the series send-off. "With Edward R. Murrow propped up next him. And at the end I want Walter to take his glasses off, and choke on the `They’re gone.’

"CBS has assured me they’re going to `eventize’ it. I want huge parties with lots of great food ... because this is it for me. You’ve got to grab it while you can."

Though there are persistent rumours of a Raymond spin-off, to headline Emmy-winning second banana Brad Garrett, and/or possibly send the senior Barones off to a Florida retirement community, Rosenthal says he and his team have not been consulted.

"I can’t say I’m thrilled with the idea of doing one. It’s not as exciting to a writer as something new. And they usually don’t work. I think Frasier is the wildly successful exception. We’ll see what happens with this new one (NBC’s Joey)."

At the very least, the end of Raymond is going to impact on the writers’ home lives.

"We always say that whenever we run out of stories, we go home and get in a fight with our wives," Rosenthal says. "And we’ve been known to keep the fights going a little longer sometimes because we needed a second act."

The final season of Everybody Loves Raymond starts Sept. 20.

YOU DON’T KNOW JACK: A few more promising pilots have emerged from the just-concluded network sessions.

One is the WB’s Jack & Bobby, which has been picked up in Canada by CHUM to run on its string of "New Net" stations (locally on Barrie’s CKVR). It’s a kind of "Smallville goes to the West Wing" hybrid that flashes back and forth in time between the contemporary childhood of two young brothers, one of whom will grow up to be the U.S. president, and faux future retrospective "interviews" with White House staffers of 2046.

The inventive hour is executive-produced and directed by TV innovator Tommy Schlamme (West Wing, Larry Sanders), and stars his actress wife, Christine Lahti, as the boys’ pot-smoking, disciplinarian, college-professor mom.

"I love working with Tommy," she says, "because we do have a shorthand. When he directs me he can say one word, and I know and he knows. There’s a communication that’s pretty profound.

"I also find that he listens a lot better as a director than he does as a husband. I actually prefer working with him than being married to him."

"Twenty-eight years of this," Schlamme sighed.