'RAYMOND' STILL HITTING ON ALL CYLINDERS.

By all rights, this is the season that ``Everybody Loves Raymond'' should lose the spin off its curveball. No less a revered comedy veteran than Norman Lear (whose classic ``All in the Family'' sets have been physically recycled in this series) speaks from experience when he insists that sitcoms should fold after five years on the air.

Still, tonight's episode finds the writers and cast in championship-season form. It opens with the whole family - Ray (Ray Romano) and wife Debra (Emmy winner Patricia Heaton), along with his parents Frank (Peter Boyle) and Marie (Doris Roberts), as well as eternally beleaguered brother Robert (Brad Garrett) - attending a school open house for one of their twin sons. The kids in the class are all reading benign little stories they've written for the occasion, when Ray's kid steps up and introduces his yarn: ``The Angry Family.'' Ray and company's reaction shot alone is worth watching the show for.

Obviously, bitterly comic recriminations follow. No one wants to accept blame for creating the apparently toxic atmosphere that inspired this innocent child to write such a vitriolic tale. Ironically, the story itself creates an even angrier family, as everyone blames everyone else for the traumas that evidently inspire Ray and Debra's boy's literary opus. The whole family is even carted into therapy, where outbursts galore occur.

Debra throws down the gauntlet first. ``I didn't just get a husband,'' she gripes to her son's teacher, ``I got a whole freak show that set up their tent right across the street.'' It gets uglier from there.

Though ``Raymond'' is neck-and-neck with ``Friends'' for the title of TV's most popular sitcom (over the summer, its repeat episodes blow just about every other series out of the water), it's bewildering as to why it doesn't garner more respect within the industry. Aside from Heaton's win, it has been criminally shut out at the Emmys.

Many people mistake it as just another family sitcom, when in fact, it's the quintessentially honest sitcom. It's neither too hokey nor too crass. It depicts families as dissolute yet inextricably bound together, just like they really are, and finds the humor in those real frictions that threaten, yet never manage, to burst family units apart.

Its characterizations are among the most finely defined on TV. Debra, with her vaguely no-nonsense disgust of Raymond's simpleton-ness, is unlike any sitcom mom ever. Doris Roberts' Marie had a sinister streak long before Nancy Marchand's Livia showed up on ``The Sopranos.''

``Raymond'' is also one of the few contemporary sitcoms that has figured out how to implement and even exploit the four-camera, live-audience situation, which is no simple feat. ``Everybody Loves Raymond'' is the rare series in which viewers understood the depth of the show's quality before the industry did, and the laughs don't seem to be diminished in this, the telling sixth season.

``EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND''

What: Sixth-season premiere of the classic dysfunctional-family sitcom.

The stars: Ray Romano, Patricia Heaton, Doris Roberts, Peter Boyle, Brad Garrett.

Where: CBS (Channel 2).

When: 9 tonight.

Our rating: Three and one half stars

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Ray Romano and Patricia Heaton star in the sixth season of ``Everybody Loves Raymond,'' beginning tonight on CBS.