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July 12, 2025 11 mins

🚖💰 In this episode of The Rank Podcast, John revisits the legendary 1978 sitcom Taxi for his Sitcom Rankings, focusing on Season 2, Episode 8 – “The Great Race.”

When Louie challenges Alex to a high-stakes bet—who can earn the most fares during an 8-hour cab shift—the race is on. What follows is a hilarious and surprisingly tense competition as Alex, the level-headed everyman, goes toe-to-toe with Louie’s conniving and underhanded tactics. The whole garage gets caught up in the action, adding fuel to the comedic fire.

John breaks down the episode’s sharp writing, iconic performances (especially from Danny DeVito), and how Taxi uses workplace rivalry to mine both laughs and heart. Does The Great Race speed into the upper tier of John's rankings, or stall out before the finish line?

Tune in to find out!


E-mail your fan questions, comments, and suggestions to TheRankwithJohnandZac@protonmail.com.

Support the show by becoming a patron at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon.com/TheRankPodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

Visit The Rank's website for up-to-date rankings at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TheRankpodcast.com.

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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Now the episode consists of following Alex and Louie around
separately and seeing how they interact with their affairs.
And of course Louie is a Dick who tries to scam people out of
money and Alex is just a nice guy.
Also, Louie gets his hack license taken from him by an
inspector, but it isn't his license, it's Tony's.
Louie was driving under Tony's license.
So I'm curious what's going to happen with Tony after this.

(00:39):
Welcome back to another episode of The Rank.
I'm John and today we're going to be ranking the next episode
of Taxi. Now, if you're enjoying these
episodes or if you're just a fanof Taxi and you enjoy consuming
content about it, please consider subscribing and or
following like the episodes and comments or e-mail your
questions and comments, suggestions, all that stuff to
the e-mail below. Please also consider becoming a
patron on our Patreon site at patreon.com/the Rank Podcast.

(01:01):
Now, today we're ranking the 8thepisode of the second season of
Taxi titled The Great Race, which was written by Glenn
Gordon Karen and directed by James Burrows.
Shocking. Now, the series is 45 years old,
so spoiler alert, if you haven'twatched it in the past 45 years,
I don't know what to tell you. I'm going to talk about it.
All right? I guess for those of you who are
new to this, the whole premise here is that we're trying to

(01:23):
figure out what is the best sitcom of all time.
So I'm going episode by episode and individually ranking each
episode. And then we average up the
scores of all the episodes, and that gives us the average
ranking for the series. This one, we're doing taxis, so
let's find out how it does. We'll start off our show with
The Potent Notables. So this 30th episode of Taxi was

(01:44):
released on Tuesday, November 9th, 1979.
It was 13th for the week at 23 rating of 23.
So it dropped a bit from last week, was actually tied with the
8:30 time slot on ABC, which wasAngie.
And for the first time in a while, it was beat by Happy
Days, which had a 23.4. So I mean, it was all close, but
I was surprised to see that it got beat by Happy Days.

(02:05):
And of course, 3's company also did better, which it always does
with a 24.8, although again, notthat big of a gap like it
usually is. Actually, it's a fairly weak
showing for the ABC Tuesday lineup as as Three's company was
only eighth. CBS had six of the top 7 slots
with 60 Minutes taking #1 this week with a 31.1 and ABC having
the only show that wasn't on CBSin the top seven.

(02:28):
It's breakout hit 8 is enough, which got second.
All right, so that's enough of the rating as let's go on to the
other boat notables here. There's two more now there,
there's a blind passenger that asks Louie to drive him to 20
129th Ave. in Brooklyn. Now there is no such address in
the borough of Brooklyn. The lowest number address on 9th
Ave. is 3724. So 21 29th Ave. would be in the

(02:49):
middle of Greenwood Cemetery. So, you know, maybe he had a
death wish, I don't know. So the writer of this episode,
Glenn Gordon Karen would later go on to create the show
Moonlighting and the show Medium.
And this was the only episode Taxi that he ever wrote.
Interestingly, I found an interview with him and he talks
about doing Picture Perfect, which was Jennifer Aniston's
first starring vehicle, which hedid because his 12 year old

(03:11):
daughter was thrilled or at least partly because of that.
Anyway, he also did the movie Clean and Sober, which he was
intensely proud of. He talked about that one a lot,
but that's what actually broughtit back around to Taxi because
he rewrote Clean and Sober a little bit.
He did some rewriting and he wastalking about rewriting being
something that writers are either OK with or they don't
like, but it's usually based on how you came up and, and his

(03:34):
first show was actually Taxi. So he talked about how Taxi was
a James L Brooks show and that he would often rewrite what
others have written and not takecredit.
So according to Glenn here, James's attitude was that
because he was the head honcho and he hired the writers, if the
episode didn't come out right, then it was his responsibility
to fix it. So Glenn here took that attitude

(03:54):
as his own, seemingly emulating James L Brooks quote.
It's so much easier to edit, reimagine, to look with some
distance at someone else's work and say, OK, I know how to fix
this than it is to create from scratch.
End Quote. I just thought that was pretty
interesting. So those are the boat notables.
Let's go to the episode overview.
We start this episode of the Little Jaunty Ditty.

(04:14):
It's pretty upbeat, which leads directly into Louie yelling at
everyone kind of in Congress. He's yelling at them about not
getting enough bookings and thathe's getting chewed out over it.
Now this starts the plot of the episodes pretty quickly, that
being that Alex and Louie are going to go head to head and see
who can get the most bookings. It does take a while to convince
Alex to do it, and it was funny that Bobby essentially

(04:36):
volunteered Alex to take up the cause of all the drivers against
Louie, but Alex doesn't want to at first.
Apparently being competitive hasbeen a problem for him in the
past, which I thought was goofy that it gets to him too
aggressive or something. Anyway, he sure didn't seem to
be too aggressive throughout theepisode though.
I mean, if if competitiveness was really a problem for him, it
wasn't displayed here. I mean there was that one moment

(04:59):
with the nuns, but that was, I mean objectively frustrating.
Like I would have been frustrated by that too.
Anyway, the garage is all betting on Alex and Louis is
taking everyone's bets, which means that if he loses, he's
going to be out a ton of money. I mean if he wins he he gains a
lot too so I see the risk rewardhere but still it's a lot of
freaking money. And then he UPS the ante that
he'd give Elaine $500 if Alex wins but she has to go on a date

(05:22):
with him if Louie wins. Now I don't really understand
the point of this from Louie's perspective because what's
what's he hoping will happen from here?
She can just get a free dinner and be disinterested and go
home. What's he gained?
Also what about Rhea Pearlman? I don't remember her her
character name anymore but she and him are great.
I want her to come back. I don't like the implication
that he may be willing to cheat on her, which does seem like

(05:44):
Louie, but I still don't like it.
Now the episode consists of following Alex and Louie around
separately and seeing how they interact with their affairs.
And of course, Louie is a Dick who tries to scam people out of
money and Alex is just a nice guy.
Also, Louie gets his hack license taken from him by an
inspector, but it isn't his license, it's Tony's.
Louie was driving under Tony's license, so I'm curious what's
going to happen with Tony after this.

(06:06):
He also doesn't stop driving obviously, he just pulls out
Bobby's hack license and starts driving under that one now.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention how he berates this
inspector as well. He asks for the inspector's ID,
and when the inspector gives himhis wallet, Louis sees pictures
of the guy's family and says that it reminds him of a chimp
act he once saw. I mean, it's good stuff.

(06:27):
And they do a call back to that joke, even just like a little
bit later in the same conversation.
But it hits, it works. So Alex ends up getting a really
lucky fare, a woman who's driving all over the city,
dropping off groceries to her friends.
But even with this stroke of luck, when they head back to the
garage and measure it up, Louie has $212.00 in bookings and Alex
has 197. So Louie's won.

(06:48):
But wait, Elaine sees Alex counting his tips and she has a
Eureka moment that tips count asmoney brought in.
Of course Louie disagrees. But this does lead to a funny
bit where Alex has made a ton ofmoney in tips and Louie has made
$0.80, cementing how much more of a Dick Louie is than the
general population. Now I'm curious your thoughts
though. Should the tips have been

(07:09):
counted Now? I submit that they should not
have been. I'm not saying I want Louie to
win, but come on. Tips don't count as money
brought in for the business. That's your money, not the
businesses. So that I don't see how that
would count. Anyway, let me know now.
In the end, Locka settles it saying that tips count.
They abide by this ruling by Locka and Louie's out a bunch of
money, although we don't see himactually pay out anybody.

(07:31):
So curious if if that'll come back later or not.
I know in this era they didn't tend to like keep things going
that much. In the in the streaming era this
would have continued. Anyway.
I'll be curious, but let's see how it ranked.
I'll wank. So the rank is where I rank the
episode based on five categories.

(07:51):
Story, acting, dialogue, episodecoherence, and character
relatability. I rank it on a scale of one to
five, one being the worst, five being the best.
And then we have a laugh counterwhere I tally up the amount of
times that the episode made me laugh out loud and that gets
added to the score. Now the first category is story,
which I gave a four and a half. This was a simple, concise, and
fun story. I wish we could see more stories

(08:11):
like this on Taxi where things don't go get overly convoluted
or complicated, but hey, they'vehad two in a row now that that
that really worked. So I'm starting to get my hopes
up. Now let's go into acting, the
next category, which I gave a 4.25.
This was one of the better actedepisodes.
Of course, it was mostly Judd Hirsch and Danny DeVito, so that
sort of makes sense. Everyone else was decent to
good, but but they weren't in itthat much, so it definitely

(08:33):
helps the score. So let's go to dialogue, which I
gave a four. This was a funny episode.
I enjoyed the back and forth andin the disparate interactions
with customers between Alex and Louis.
It was it was all good stuff. So let's go to episode
coherence, which I gave a 4.25. The episode coherence is really
good. It's a it's a simple plot and
easy to follow so the charactersare decent, but there's not too

(08:54):
much depth. The only thing that I didn't
really like was that the race ingeneral just didn't seem to fit
the argument. So basically Louis says he's
embarrassed by their low bookings and that he could do
better, and essentially he does.Even if you say that Alex beat
him, he still beat everyone else, so doesn't that prove his
point? Also, was everyone else drive or
do they just sit in the garage for an entire 8 hour shift?

(09:15):
It's not a huge deal, you know, it's taxi, but enough to keep it
from being a 5. So let's go to the last
category, which is character relatability, which I gave a
four. I can understand everyone's
motivation here, but if I were Louie, I think I would have
challenged like Nardo and Bobby combined to prove the point more
effectively. It's really all about Louie and
Alex here and, and I related to them both.
So job well done I guess, but I would like to see it play it out

(09:38):
a little bit differently. But maybe this is like the best
version of things. Then there is the laugh counter.
So the rankings here have actually been pretty high and
you know, assuming I don't have a super low laugh counter means
it's going to get a decent score, right?
And I got a 13, which is not a ton, but it's pretty good.
So there you have it, a grand total of 34, which makes it and

(10:00):
I'd watch it again. And As for the series average,
it went up to a 25.27, which moves it out of rank it and
regret it up to meh the ochre. But hey, that's a good sign that
things are going going up. So thanks for listening and or
watching. If you'd like to see a list of
our episodes and series rankings, so you can do that on
our website at the rankpodcast.com.
Remember to subscribe, review and comment.

(10:21):
Please consider supporting us onour Patreon site at
patreon.com/the Rank Podcast where you'll get access to all
the archived episodes. And I'll leave you with this.
Why did Hitler give this episodea bad review?
No, no, somebody stop him because he saw the title and was
appalled there were no Aryans init.
I don't know, doing a Hitler joke maybe is not the best idea,
but it's called the Great Race, so please don't cancel it.

(10:45):
Please. I apologize.
Internet. So this 29th episode of Taxi was
released on Wait, is it 29th? I think that's right.

(11:08):
Many hours later, so this 30th episode of Taxi was released.
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