Taxi: The Complete Second Season (2005)

Review by: Brendon McCullin
Date: 2/15/05

Unlike the recent, and lame, Jimmy Fallon-Queen Latifah vehicle, the television show Taxi is rightly considered a classic. During its relatively short run the show set a template for smart workplace sitcoms that would still be in use today if anyone was actually making smart workplace sitcoms.

The recent DVD release of Taxi: The Complete Second Season (Paramount) finds the show hitting its high point. Gone is first season’s new-to-the-city-character played by Randall Carver, through whose perspective the audience was too often brought into a story. In the second season, the audience was on its own in the company of the cynical, but hopeful, cabbies of the Sunshine Cab Co.

The difference is that while the first season of the show features its fair share of solidly funny episodes, the second season features out and out sitcom classics. Most shows are overwhelmed by just one wacky character but Taxi dared to have two, adding Christopher Lloyd’s burned out Reverend Jim Ignatowski to Andy Kaufman’s indecipherable foreigner, Latka Gravas. The introduction of Rev. Jim on the season’s third episode features some of the best comedy bits in sitcom history, including the classic “Slow Down” give and take during Rev. Jim’s driving test (“What does a yellow light mean?” “Slow down.” “What…does…a…yellow…light…mean?”).

It’s during the second season that Kaufman gets his chance to shine as well, in episodes featuring a call to arms from Latka’s hopelessly confused country and Carol Kane’s first appearance as his love interest, Simka.

The season is so strong that even when an episode’s central story is carried by Tony Danza, Jeff Conaway or Marilu Henner – and each player in the ensemble gets his or her shot at center stage – there’s barely a drop-off in pacing or laughs.

As always though, Taxi was largely a forum for the ying and yang relationship between Judd Hirsch’s career taxi driver and moral centerpiece Alex Reiger and Danny DeVito’s proudly moral-less boss Louie DePalma. Both characters were given different dimensions during the show’s second season. Louie is almost but not quite humanized from his romance with nice girl Zena, played by DeVito’s real life wife Rhea Perlman. And the ever put-upon Reiger is given both multiple potential love interests and a fuller back-story (in an episode that finds Alex confronting his estranged and dying father).

A show has really got things rolling when it can end a season with a two-part episode featuring fantasy sequences, guest appearances by Herve Villachaize and Eric Sevareid, plus the sight of Judd Hirsch, Tony Danza, Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd singing and dancing and manage to pull it all off.

The one disappointment is that with a cast and crew as successful, diverse and opinionated as Taxi’s that there’s no commentary track. Even Conaway and Danza reminiscing and congratulating one another would be better than nothing. And it would really be interesting to hear someone from behind the scenes like James L. Brooks discuss the show’s use of drug humor with the Rev. Jim character – something a sitcom would be hard pressed to get away with these days.

Even without extras, though, Taxi: The Complete Second Season is certainly worth the ride.

(Brendon McCullin is a staff writer for 2 Walls Webzine.)