Taxi

Taxi was, during it's five-year run, the most funny, engaging, memorable, and heartbreaking show on television. The show helped to redefine situation comedies and created a handful of classic characters.

The show revolves around the drivers at the Sunshine Cab company: Alex Rieger (Judd Hirsch) was the good-hearted mensch who finds himself solving everyone else's problems. Bobby Wheeler (Jeff Conaway) is an aspiring actor and ladies man. Tony Banta (Tony Danza) is a struggling boxer who can never seem to win a fight. Elaine Nardo (Marilu Henner) is a single mother of two with dreams of opening her own art gallery. Reverend Jim Ignatowski (Christopher Lloyd) is an absolute space cadet, and Louie DePalma (Danny DeVito) is surely the nastiest, angriest, most miserable boss in history. Thanks to DeVito's charm, he is still somehow lovable.

Besides the great acting in "Taxi," there was the writing- always funny and often bittersweet without ever being maudlin or melodramatic. There are episodes that can make you laugh so hard you cry, and vice versa. Thanks to the genius of director James Burrows Taxi stands as one of television's best shows. And who can forget the haunting theme by Bob James?

If you get a chance to see "Taxi," take it... here's hoping it gets a DVD release in the near future.

Grade: A+

What more can you say about one of the classic situation comedies of all time. Just like many of the classics, this show was a great ensemble. Judd Hirsch may have been the star, but it was the interplay between the cast members that made this show what it was. Tony, Bobby, Elaine, Jim, Louie and, of course, Latka were all great characters and they helped make this show what it was. But, it not only was the characters. The writing made this one of the more intelligent comedies of its era and you could see a lot of what made "Cheers" great in this show. This show deserves a lot of the praise it has gotten over the years and its too bad that that more shows can't follow the example that "Taxi" showed.

Taxi ran for five seasons on television and sadly came to an end when too many of its cast members decided to strike out on their own and most had really successful careers. Can you imagine a show where Danny DeVito, Tony Danza, Andy Kaufman, and Christopher Lloyd all appeared and many times in the same episodes? Getting them at their full market big screen value would cause any studio to go chapter 11.

All of these people got their first big break on Taxi a comedy with only one set for most of the episodes. DeVito was cab dispatcher Louis DiPalma, a bully and a tyrant who reveled in his rule over the lives of his drivers. DeVito had few redeeming qualities other than he was a realist. Part of his realism was stepping on the dreams of others.

People like Tony Danza who drove a cab to pay the rent, but was really a boxer looking for the career path upwards and more than likely missed it drove for DeVito. Jeff Conaway was an actor who drove between gigs as most of the actors I know do something else for a living and dream of becoming stars. John Randall Carver was a young law student who left after a season. Marilu Henner was a divorcée and constantly avoiding the innuendos of DeVito of which there were plenty. She was sexually harassed, maybe the most sexually harassed woman ever to be a television character.

Funniest of all was Christopher Lloyd who was a drugged out refugee of the 60s. He replaced Carver and DeVito's barbs never bothered him because he dealt with them through ignorance. A lot like the way Chico Marx dealt with Groucho in their films.

The only one who could really deal with DeVito was Judd Hirsch who was as much New York as Jerry Orbach on Law And Order. He was a 40 something man who had no attachments and no pretensions, he drove a cab to earn a living and liked his job. He was friend and counselor to all and was one of the favorite characters I liked in all the decades of watching the tube.

Lastly there was Andy Kaufman who sadly did not live long after Taxi finished its run. He was unique to say the least in his comedy. The garage mechanic from some unnamed Eastern European country which allowed Kaufman to develop his own accent for his own country. He drove DeVito and the rest nuts with his nonsequiters in a foreign accent.

Taxi had one of the great ensemble casts in the history of television and incubated many a career still going to this day.

One of the very funniest ensemble US sit-coms ever, I loved "Taxi" when it was first transmitted in the late 70's. I was too young to get into "M.A.S.H." from the start, "Soap" started brightly then faded, "Happy Days" and it's spin-offs were too young, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" was only shown infrequently in the UK, "The Bob Newhart Show" wasn't picked up at all and "Rhoda" my other favourite of the era, only played on BBC2. "Taxi" was shown on BBC1 in the early evening and I almost never missed an episode.

The main character I suppose was Judd Hirsch as Alex, the go-to guy for anyone with a problem, while Marilu Henner as the sassy Elaine, Jeff Conaway as moonlighting actor Bobby and Tony Banta as Tony the dim-witted boxer were prominent in support, indeed the last two of course can be seen as morphing into the character of Joey in "Friends" 20 years or so later.

The real scene-stealers of course were Danny DeVito as the nasty, lippy depot manager Louie, Christopher Lloyd as the flaky Reverend Jim Ignatowski and Andy Kaufman as the surreal man-child Latka Graves. Without "Taxi" I doubt there would have been a "Cheers" or indeed "Friends" but with very funny scripts by a talented pool of writers including David Lloyd, the Charles brothers, Ken Estin and Earl Pomeranz and produced by James L Brooks, the laugh count in each episode was usually high and the longer you lived with the characters, the more you liked and almost knew them, especially as the action almost never left the front of the depot where the characters congregated.

I've just treated myself by re-watching my favourite episode, where Louie is seduced by the boss's wife, a vamped-up superb guest-shot by Eileen Brennan, in fact I'd go as far to say it's one of the funniest comedic shows ever. They couldn't all hit that standard, of course, but the general consistency kept it going for 114 episodes. It was De Vito and to a lesser degree Lloyd who would go on to break into films and as others have said its perhaps a little surprising that no spin-off shows were ever devised.

Perhaps it's better that way though, leaving the employees of the Sunshine Cab Company in our memory as the collective band of cabbies who regularly drove us into fits of laughter, week after week.

Taxi was a creative show that will be remembered for years to come. Each episode featured huge laughs that make your sides hurt, due in no small part to Christopher Lloyd. My favorite episode is the one where Jim takes the test to be a driver. The cast had a unique chemistry that you don't see on shows these days. Taxi isn't television, it's TELEVISION.