“Zen and the Art of Cab Driving”
Not available for streaming on Hulu or CBS All Access; there are some pretty good deals on DVD copies of the third season on Amazon.
After Jim picks up a couple of businessmen at the airport and overhears them talking about a business seminar that left them feeling “higher than any drug,” Jim decides to live his life the way the man who teaches the seminar says to: If you do everything perfectly, someday your goals will be achieved. The first order of business is for Jim to be a perfect cab driver, something which involved upping his nightly take from around $12 to over $300, making him temporarily Louie’s favorite person in the garage. (He does this by offering coffee, sandwiches, and Frank Sinatra karaoke—you know, like today’s Ubers.)
But what is the goal Jim is working up to? Good question: It’s a horrifying multiple-television contraption that seems impossible to watch, let alone enjoy. When he invited the other cabbies over and they say exactly that, he doesn’t seem surprised—maybe because he knows they’ll be enticed, somehow, by wanting to watch something on a small screen while there are multiple other TV screens on, all with the sound blaring. (It’s like a really condensed sports bar, without the bar.)
“It is a rare episode of a TV series that dares to examine its own addictive nature, or the way television trivializes rioting, slavery, and war by cutting these things together into ‘visual bites,'” Frank Lovece and Jules Franco write in Hailing Taxi, giving the show far too much credit; there is little examination here, just the appearance of deep thought paired with a pop psychology-referencing episode title.
There is one great moment of something Jim recounting something he’s been watching on his TV monster: The Delaware legislature debating whether the state’s residents will be called Delawareans or Delawarites. (“Personally, I’m rooting for the Delawareans—although the Delawarites put up a good argument. Delaweenians didn’t stand a chance,” Jim sniffs.)
“Louie’s Mother”
Not available for streaming on Hulu or CBS All Access; there are some pretty good deals on DVD copies of the third season on Amazon.
It’s often deeply uncomfortable when Louie, who’s generally correctly portrayed as a large, sexist bug wearing a suit, has feelings, but it works quite well here—likely because it’s one of the first times the show has dealt with the disturbing, codependent relationship Louie seems to have with his mother. After a fight, she decides to check herself into a nursing home, something naturally conveyed by Louie as amazing news (and also his decision). He makes a big show of saying he’s throwing a party at his new “bachelor pad” and not inviting any of the “loser” cab drivers, none of whom would attend, obviously.
But there’s something clearly wrong, and Alex, whose job it is to know when things are wrong with the other characters, knows it. He ends up showing up to Louie’s party, which was attended by three terrifying “catatonic scuzzos,” as Lovece and Franco described them, who left the “party” at 7:30. Alex and Louie end up at Mario’s, Alex out of pity.
The next day, Louie is a mess, the party having revealed to himself that he’s just a lonely person who wants to live with his mother. He’s so miserable that the cab drivers invite him to play cards; when, inevitably, Alex asks, “Who raised Louie[‘s bet]?” Louie cries out, “Ma raised Louie!” and begins crying. Danny DeVito is a very good actor, thankfully, because that dialogue is not great after looking at it typed out.
Louie goes to pick her up from the nursing home, where we meet Louie’s mother onscreen for the first and only time. Portrayed by DeVito’s actual mother, she’s perfect—cursing him out in Italian through the door, blowing cigarette smoke in his face, all of it. DeVito told Lovece and Franco, “[Co-creator Ed Weinberger] talked to her, explained the role, etc., told her it would be a lot to learn. And she told him, ‘Hey, I can do dialogue!’ So he hired her, picked her up in a limousine, brought her to the studio. She was smoking like a fiend, hadda have her cigarettes in the room.…And she wanted a TV so she could watch her soap operas—her stories, as she calls them. They gave her everything she wanted. She did better than me!”
As she should.