Finished the sitcom
Taxi recently and thought it was pretty middling. With only a few exceptions the only really good episodes are the ones that focused on Louie (Danny Devito), Latka (Andy Kaufman), or Jim (Christopher Lloyd), or the (extremely few) that did anything with the whole taxi setup. Unfortunately, those episodes only make up like a fourth of each season -- Kaufman really had no interest in doing a sitcom so his contract stipulated he'd only be in half of a season's episodes, and Christopher Lloyd didn't join the main cast until partway through season two. The rest of the cast kinda sucked, being mostly normal people without any real quirks or funny characteristics (the exception being Tony Danza's character but him being a dumb meathead usually wasn't very funny). Oh, and Carol Kane was pretty great, too, though sadly she only joined in the final season and was tied to Latka, so she didn't appear much.
The show rarely featured a B-plot, so if the main plot sucked (which it usually did) then the episode was fucked. Taxi also often didn't use a lot of the cast, instead typically pairing Reiger (Judd Hirsch) with another character and focusing entirely on that duo; Hell, sometimes it'd just be Reiger plus some new episodic character. Speaking of plots, you'd think a show called Taxi would often focus on the characters driving a taxi and picking up weird people or something like that but, no, for like 80% of the episodes you could have the cast working in a deli and nothing would change. Also worth noting is that they tried the whole 'will they, won't they' thing with leads Judd Hirsch and Marilu Henner but the two had zero chemistry, so outside of like an episode a season the pairing was rarely brought up (and when it was it usually made Reiger seem like a cuck given how most of Henner's character's plots revolved around her love life).
Interestingly, James Burrows and Les Charles & Glen Charles worked heavily on the show for the first four seasons and would go on to create Cheers, which fixed pretty much every problem I have with Taxi, making me wonder if they realized the same issues with Taxi.
