When I was a kid, somewhere around middle school, I had a small black-and-white TV in my room.
Nothing fancy.
Just one of those little sets with chunky knobs, rabbit ears, and the kind of glow only an old CRT could make.
On a set like that, you didn’t just turn it on and go. You had to work for a picture. Nudge the antenna. Turn it a few degrees and wait. Sometimes hold it yourself, because at that point you were the antenna. When the picture finally locked in, it felt like something you’d earned rather than something you’d switched on.
There was no guide. You turned the dial and took what was there.
Often, what I found late at night was Taxi.
Sunshine Cab Company Link to heading
I have fond memories of staying up way too late watching reruns of Taxi.
That opening theme. It’s permanently burned into my brain. I can hear it now just thinking about the show.
The late-night quiet.
City lights.
The slow shot of the cab crossing the bridge.
The song is “Angela,” by Bob James. I went looking for it online and ended up deep in his catalog. It’s an electric piano, a bass line that walks instead of hurries, and no jokes anywhere. A half-hour comedy that opened on a tune that sounded like the end of a very long shift.
The cab crosses the Queensboro Bridge. Then you’re inside the Sunshine Cab Company, a dim Manhattan garage.
The show ran from 1978 to 1983. Four seasons on ABC, a last one on NBC. It came out of the same school of television as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, with James L. Brooks among its creators, and it carried the same idea. People spend their lives at work, so that’s where the story is.
It won Outstanding Comedy Series three years running.
Everybody Was Going to Be Something Else Link to heading
And then the characters.
Danny DeVito.
Tony Danza.
Christopher Lloyd, long before he became Doc Brown in Back to the Future.
Judd Hirsch as Alex Rieger. Marilu Henner as Elaine Nardo. Andy Kaufman as Latka Gravas. Jeff Conaway as Bobby Wheeler. Carol Kane as Simka.
Here’s the part I didn’t understand as a kid, watching with the sound turned low so nobody would know I was still awake.
Almost nobody in that garage wanted to be a cab driver.
Bobby was an actor. Tony was a boxer. Elaine worked at an art gallery. Latka was Latka. Driving was the thing they did in the meantime, until the real life started.
Alex was the exception. Alex knew he was a cab driver, and he’d made his peace with it.
That’s the joke. It’s also the whole show.
Louie De Palma ran the place from inside a wire cage. DeVito played him small and mean and never once asked you to like him.
And Reverend Jim taking his driving test. Christopher Lloyd, all elbows and delay. What does a yellow light mean? Slow down. What does a yellow light mean? Slooow doooown. The whole joke is how long he’s willing to wait.
A show about people stuck in a job they didn’t choose, and it was warm instead of bleak. I didn’t have language for that at eleven years old. I just knew I didn’t want the episode to end.
The Faces That Followed Me Around Link to heading
What’s funny now is how many of those actors became familiar faces throughout the rest of my life. You’d see them pop up everywhere:
- Who’s the Boss?, with Tony Danza a few years later on a much bigger stage
- Throw Momma from the Train, DeVito directing himself, that same coiled energy pointed somewhere new
- Back to the Future, where Reverend Jim turned into a scientist with a DeLorean
- countless reruns, movies, sitcoms, and late-night channel-surfing moments
Judd Hirsch kept turning up too. Ordinary People, then Independence Day, then a dozen other things, always with that same unhurried delivery.
Spend enough late nights with a group of actors and they stop being strangers. You just keep running into them for the next forty years.
Those memories still make me smile when they randomly surface.
July 19, 2022 Link to heading
So on July 19, 2022, I took the Warner Bros. Studio Tour Hollywood.
The Deluxe Tour, specifically. The long one, the version that gets you into the prop house.
That was the part I’d come for. Not the backlot streets. The shelves. Aisle after aisle of furniture and lamps and telephones and appliances, every piece tagged and waiting for something to need it again.
And somewhere in there I stopped dead in my tracks, because of this little television sitting on a shelf.
A tiny black-and-white Sears TV.
Old knobs.
VHF and UHF dials.
A worn screen.
A Warner Bros. “HOLD” tag taped to the front.
I had to take a picture.
Not because it was valuable.
Not because it was rare.
Because for a split second, it transported me right back to being a kid sitting in a dark room, watching late-night television long after I was supposed to be asleep.
Taxi was never a Warner Bros. show. This set never sat in the Sunshine Cab Company garage and never will. It was tagged and shelved for some production that has nothing to do with any of this.
Memory doesn’t care.
It saw the knobs and the dials and the little worn screen, and it went straight to a dark bedroom and a show about people driving other people around New York.
That might be the real magic of old technology.
Not the hardware.
The memories it carried.
A prop tag says HOLD because someone means to come back for it later.
Turns out that little TV had been holding something for me for about thirty years.
Watch It, Hear It Link to heading
If any of this put that theme back in your head:
- Taxi on Prime Video. All five seasons at the Sunshine Cab Company.
- “Angela” on Amazon Music. The theme itself, three and a half minutes of it.
- Restoration: The Best of Bob James. “Angela” with no cab attached. James wrote it for the show in 1978 and it outlived the show by decades.
Start with the pilot. Then let the autoplay take you.