While a marital dispute can feel like torture for some, it was simply good inspiration for the writing staff of Everybody Loves Raymond.

“We always say that whenever we run out of stories, we go home and get in a fight with our wives,” said sitcom creator Phil Rosenthal during an interview wth the Kenosha News. “And we’ve been known to keep the fights going a little longer sometimes because we need a second act.”

The series, centered around the trials and mishaps of the Barone family, frequently borrowed from the real lives of the cast and crew when developing plot material. Rosenthal recalled watching the series with his own family, upon which he based the characters.

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“Sometimes I’ll sit with them and watch the show with them,” said the director. “We had an episode where Ray calls the parents on the show, he says, ‘You psychopath.’ And my mother hits my father, ‘Hey, WE’RE the psychopaths!’”

But while Rosenthal had plenty of material to pull from in real life, Everybody Loves Raymond didn’t have the easiest start. The director revealed that writing for the series got better as time went on.

“It got easier (over the years),” said Rosenthal during an interview with The Day. “The beginning is the hardest part, because you’re creating the world, you’re creating the characters. That’s hard to build from nothing, but once it’s built, it’s built. You’re thinking of new things for them to do. Toward the end, it gets hard again because you’ve either done everything or you’ve done everything good, at least. And you don’t want to repeat. We did 210 episodes, which is a lot of anything. So we had to stop because, frankly, we couldn’t think of any more stories that were good enough. We wanted to get off the air before we became lousy.”