Taxi (TV series)
American television sitcom (1978–1983)

Taxi is an American television sitcom that originally aired on ABC from September 12, 1978, to May 6, 1982, and on NBC from September 30, 1982, to June 15, 1983. It focuses on the everyday lives of a handful of New York City taxi drivers and their abusive dispatcher. For most of the run of the show, the ensemble cast consisted of taxi drivers Alex Reiger (Judd Hirsch), Bobby Wheeler (Jeff Conaway), Elaine Nardo (Marilu Henner), Tony Banta (Tony Danza), and "Reverend" Jim Ignatowski (Christopher Lloyd), along with dispatcher Louie De Palma (Danny DeVito) and mechanic Latka Gravas (Andy Kaufman). Taxi was produced by the John Charles Walters Company, in association with Paramount Network Television, and was created by James L. Brooks, Stan Daniels, David Davis, and Ed. Weinberger, all of whom were brought on board after working on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (which ended in 1977).
The show was a critical and commercial success and is widely regarded as one of the greatest television shows of all time. It was nominated for 34 Primetime Emmy Awards and won 18, including wins in three consecutive years for Outstanding Comedy Series. It has remained in syndicated reruns ever since the series ended.
Premise and themes
The show focuses on the employees who work the night shift at the fictional Sunshine Cab Company, and its principal setting is the company's fleet garage in Manhattan. Among the drivers, only Alex Reiger, who is disillusioned with life, considers cab driving his profession.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Taxi (TV series)” as american television sitcom (1978–1983). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as american television sitcom (1978–1983). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q427529. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1978, 1982, 1983 and 1977.
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This entry incorporates text from “Taxi (TV series)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.