The gang at the Sunshine Cab Company continue to aspire to bigger and better things, from Tony Banta (Tony Danza) and his boxing career and Bobby Wheeler's (Jeff Conaway) acting gigs, to single-mother Elaine Nardo (Marilu Henner), who struggles to find a way into Manhattan's exclusive art world. And as before, only Alex Reiger (Judd Hirsch), whom everyone turns to for help, considers himself a full-time career cabbie.

The show's ensemble structure and the rich characterizations almost across the board, both in terms of the writing and the performances, were in some ways too much of a good thing, insofar as this had a tendency to hinder the development of several characters that might very well have succeeded in a sitcom all by themselves.

One thing that was clear by the third season was that audiences had embraced Taxi's more outrageous characters in favor of those more identifiably human. Three characters presumably conceived to fill out the background - scurrilous dispatcher Louie de Palma (Danny DeVito), bizarre immigrant Latka Gravas (Andy Kaufman), and spaced-out ex-hippie Reverend Jim Ignatowski (Christopher Lloyd) - were now dominating episodes over Tony, Bobby, and Elaine stories, and even to some extent over top-billed Judd Hirsch.

Louie is as vile as ever, and his contempt for all that is decent is stretched in such shows as "On the Job (Part 2)," which finds an out-of-work Louie going to work for a Wall Street firm. The punch line, of course, is that even the scummiest of stock brokers find Louie too disgusting to work with. (De Vito can be seen breaking up in one shot, as his new boss tells him how repulsive he is.)

Though Latka was essentially a one-joke throwaway, someone to cut away to cap a scene with a sure-fire laugh, and the possibilities of the character had really been exhausted by the end of the second year, audiences still liked him and the writers dutifully came up with new material, such as the inspired "Latka's Cookies." A greater discovery was Reverend Jim, whose character reaches new heights in "Tony's Sister and Jim," guest-starring Rhoda/The Simpsons' Julie Kavner as a woman actually attracted to wacky Jim, much to brother Tony's consternation. Another fine show, the transcendental and way ahead of its time "Zen and the Art of Cab Driving," finds Jim seeking fulfillment and validation through television, spending all his money on an elaborate home theater system. The technology may have since evolved, but this particular episode will surely resonate with DVD Talk readers.

Unfortunately, all this comes to some degree at the expense of more episodes focusing on the other characters, and they often end up playing straight men to Latka, Louie, and Jim. Alex Reiger, originally positioned as the show's "Hawkeye," the humanist center of the Sunshine Cab Co. universe, is still the focus of Taxi's best scripts, but he's still underused. Alex's daughter (Talia Balsam) returns in a typical episode, featuring a sensational Louise Lasser as Alex's bitter and contemptuous ex-wife. Funny as the Jim, Latka, and Louie shows are - and they are often extremely funny - shows about Alex are much more rooted in coming to terms with life's disappointments and the everyday struggles of real human relationships. Through Alex Taxi's writers also nailed the way people really respond to absurd situations. In "On the Job (Part 2)," for instance, Alex is forced into a job as a night watchman, trapped all night long in a small room watching a bank of video security monitors. Bored out of his mind he turns one of the cameras on his own station, and soon becomes carried away creating his own late-night talk show. (The denouement, featuring Al Lewis, is brilliant.)

Ultimately, one suspects Taxi would've benefited from more of this. In its first three seasons the show got funnier but also became less real. The identifiable concerns of Bobby, Tony, and Elaine largely faded away or their ambitions became jokes (Tony's poor boxing record, for instance). Over those first three years the show only got funnier but it still lost a large part of its audience, probably in part because you didn't care and identify with them in the same way one could with the characters on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, All in the Family or M*A*S*H. Duck Soup may be the funnier, superior Marx Bros. movie, but audiences preferred the more identifiably human A Night at the Opera. By Year Three, Taxi was more the former than the latter.

Video & Audio

A writer's strike limited Taxi's output to just 20 new episodes during the 1980-81 season, which are spread over four discs. The transfers are visually passable, as is the Dolby Digital mono, but no more than that. There are no subtitle options or chapter menus - nothing - and no Extra Features.

Parting Thoughts

Though it's always best to watch the run of a series from the beginning, those unfamiliar with Taxi could do worse than to start watching the show here, in its third season. Nearly every show has its moments, with an unusually high percentage hitting home runs.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Los Angeles and Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf -- The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune.