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Taxi: A Woman Between Friends/The Great Race

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“A Woman Between Friends”

Available on Hulu | Available on CBS All Access

A lot about this episode feels off, the least of which being the strange, synth-y interstitial music the producers inexplicably used throughout. Just as Taxi breaks sitcom molds, it also sometimes finds itself fulfilling the worst clichés of its genre and era.

If you couldn’t guess, “A Woman Between Friends” centers around Bobby and Tony dating the same woman at the same time. This being a sitcom, the situation reduces both of them to five-year-old mentality, with Elaine reliably acting, throughout, as their mother. The women they’re dating is portrayed as nothing but a sex object; you get the picture.

That the scenarios and characters are clearly exaggerated (to what effect?) doesn’t really do much for the sexist ideas being thrown about onscreen. (The b-plot centers around Elaine acting as a mother to Alex, too.) Recognizing your prejudices isn’t the same thing as overcoming them.

“The Great Race”

Available on Hulu

Screen Shot 2016-01-20 at 11.21.58 AM

It almost feels like an inevitability, this episode. Pitting two cabbies against each other is just a good sitcom idea, and having it be Alex’s “sober yin” to Louie’s “raging yang,” as Les Chappell put it, works better than having it be any of the other drivers. After some meaningless fight, Louie and Alex bet that the other can’t bring in more cash in one night than the other.

All the other cabbies place bets on Alex (Elaine bets a date with Louie that he won’t win, and goes into a near-catatonic state for the final hours of the race, finally realizing what she’s done), and then the whole episode is just the two of them driving around, being taxi drivers. (It also shows you why Taxi only shows you the drivers in the garage; watching people drive doesn’t make for great TV.

It’s a decent episode about just how dull working in a garage must be, but really, that’s all it is. The most I can say about this episode was its plot and that it worked; there’s just not much happening under the surface. It’s an imperfect prototype of one of those episodes of The Office where they do nothing the entire time. (Like The Office, but in a taxi.)

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  • random_observer_2011

    I loved the Taxi nostalgia but I was most interested in your assessment of the episode “A woman between friends” for the distance that has passed between the 70s and now, how sitcom situations are interpreted compared to real life then and now [I recently read a critique of Friends from the point of view of economic realism that convinced me, save that I hadn’t imagined anyone in Gen X took real life advice from sitcoms], and the different idioms we use across time and generations.

    For example, that the situations are exaggerated deliberately [ditto with all sitcom characters] seems not to be a point so cavalierly dismissed. It’s been the stock in trade of several genres of theatrical comedy from its roots, and was baked into the cake of sitcoms from the beginning. It can be done well, for laughs, or be done poorly, so overblown that the characters are just irritating [thinking of Seth MacFarlane here, but he’s just an extremist of the form, there are many others]. But it can’t be eliminated without killing the form. Nobody laughs at reality. Whatever you’re trying to do- zany women, lazy and stupid men, horny either, crabby mothers, disengaged fathers, sarcastic sociopaths, etc., has to be just that bit over the top. It’s not about ‘recognizing prejudices’- it’s about taking situations and people-types everyone will likely be familiar with in real life and exaggerating that which is normally mundane or even tiresome until it is funny. You can meet all the types of characters in Taxi in many workplaces now, playing similar roles, just as you could back then. The scenario with the two guys and the girl and the role Elaine plays are similarly OTT, but the basic players and scene are true to life as ever.

    I can’t imagine the woman being fought over wanted to be seen purely as a sex object…. or would have in reality… I am, of course, going to have to think of that. Plenty of people at many points in life rather enjoy being so considered. Sex and the City even made it a bipartisan experience on TV, as it always was in life.

    On a different level, once COULD consider what happens in that episode as the writers “recognizing their prejudices”, in the sense that an older idiom would have described as “writing about the funny side of life” or as a “comedy of manners”, not assuming that the prejudices were inaccurate or to be corrected. Comedy has always poked fun at not only human behaviour but at the frames we use to interpret and categorize it, and in a more sophisticated language than the ones we are limited to today, and that has included poking fun at “prejudices” and challenging their validity, or not. But doing that in such blunt terms was never the point.

    The other element that is interesting about this episode is that it can be seen as an early example of what has become a dominant sitcom trope- stupid childish men, prey to a woman, protected by another woman. Or variations. It wasn’t new even in the 70s, but it’s practically definitive of sitcoms now. In Friends, all 6 main characters had their stupid/crazy sides, but the women were uniformly superior to the men. Everybody Loves Raymond was basically hundreds of episodes of variations on the theme. This, too, is not without its antecedents even in material from far more patriarchal times. Shakespeare, not exactly a pioneer feminist, had his moments with this.