June 14, 2025 • 10 mins
🚕💫 Old flames, fresh laughs, and a surprising glow-up. In this episode of The Rank Podcast, John hops back into the yellow cab of classic television with a look at Taxi Season 2, Episode 6: “The Lighter Side of Angela Matusa.”
When Alex reconnects with his shy, awkward high school classmate Angela—who’s now confident, outspoken, and unrecognizably transformed—the episode delivers a mix of sharp comedy and unexpected heart. John dives into how Taxi balances punchlines with poignant character moments, and what this episode says about growth, perception, and second chances.
Does Angela’s return make this a top-tier Taxi entry? Or does it stall in John’s Sitcom Rankings? Tune in and 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 TheRankwithJohnandZac.com.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Only to find out that the reasonthat Angela had been hesitant to
get into a relationship with himwas because he has a wife and
four kids. Which actually did get me.
It made me laugh. I don't know what that says.
About me. I know what kind of man you are.
(00:30):
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 enjoy consuming
content about it, please subscribe and or follow like the
episodes and comments or e-mail your questions, suggestions and
all that stuff. Please also consider becoming a
Patreon on our patreonpage@patreon.com/the Rank
(00:51):
podcast where you can get all ofthe archived episodes.
Now, today we're going to be ranking the 6th episode of the
second season of Taxi titled TheLighter Side of Angela Matusa,
which was written by Earl Pomerantz and directed by James
Burrows. Now, the series is 45 years old,
so I'm not going to worry about spoilers.
That's your spoiler warning. So just I want to let everybody
know that sort of the premise here is that we're trying to
(01:13):
figure out what's the best sitcom of all time.
So we're ranking all the episodes of different sitcoms
and then averaging out the rankings to figure out what's
the best of all time. So as we continue this, let's go
to the potent notables for this episode Attacks.
So the 28th episode of Taxi was released on Tuesday, October
23rd, 1979. We're back to getting normal
(01:34):
ratings, what with the World Series being over, and Taxi did
pretty well. It was ninth for the week at
23.9. It didn't beat its lead in
Three's Company which had a 27.5, but it did beat every
other ABC show that night, including Happy Days.
Now when we're looking at the first season of Taxi every week,
ABC had most of the top 15 shows, but things continue
(01:55):
turning against ABC 19 79 here 3's company was second and then
8 is enough was 8 ironically, then Taxi, then Happy Days and
Angie. So that's five of 15, which
isn't too bad, but CBS had numbers one and three through 7
and added three more, giving it 8 out of the top 15.
So is the cycle changing? Is a new juggernaut awakening?
(02:18):
I guess we'll find out. Now I've mentioned this potent
notable before, but it bears repeating.
And it's slightly different for this episode.
But at the commercial break, there is a soft playing of the
show's theme song on keyboard. Now the reason for this is that
the music was originally writtenin season 1 to frame Angela's
character, but it was then decided to use the song as the
show's theme music. Now, when I read the synopsis of
(02:41):
this episode, I was not excited because as those of you who've
been with us from the beginning know, we did not like the Blind
date episode. I actually wondered if they
would be crass enough to use another actress to play Angela.
But to my surprise, it was the same actress, Susan Suzanne
Kent. Now Suzanne Kent was one of the
original members of the Groundlings, which I was
(03:02):
surprised to find out, and she created the Sunday Company and
was its founding director, whichmeant nothing to me because I
didn't know what that was. Apparently it's a group within
Groundlings that write and perform a new sketch comedy show
every Sunday night. I did find an interview with
Earl Pomerance, the writer of this episode, when I went
searching to see if Suzanne lostweight for this role.
So here's what I found. Apparently Michael Leeson, the
(03:25):
writer of the first episode Blind Date, which was nominated
for an Emmy for God knows why, based this on a real experience
of Ed Weinberger's who quote after enjoying a phone
conversation with a woman who worked at his answering service,
asked her sight on scene out on a date only to discover that she
looks significantly different than her voice.
Numerous pounds different. End Quote.
Apparently because Suzanne lost a bunch of weight, it triggered
(03:47):
the crack comedy team of writersfor Taxi to make a sequel.
So she had apparently lost weight on her own and they saw
her. Hey, we should make fun of the
fact that you used to be fat. So Nieto gang, do people still
say that? All right, let's go to the
episode overview. So we start off the episode with
Tony trying to recruit a softball.
Of course I knew already what this episode was going to be
about, but man was I hoping thatthat it would mostly be about a
(04:10):
softball. I know I've mentioned this in
previous episodes, but the depiction of company softball
teams and the fact that my mom was on one gave me such an
expectation that I would be playing on softball teams for
the companies I work for and as an adult and that has never
happened. One of the bigger let downs of
becoming an adult I think. Anyway, of course this episode
doesn't stay on the softball. Alex gets a message from Angela
(04:32):
and she's going to stop by the garage.
Apparent. I guess he got the message just
in time because she arrives pretty soon after that.
But before she does, we are reminded that she's fat.
They even give us a flashback tothe episode from season 1 to
remind us of her immensity. Then they start making fat jokes
about it. Then Louis joins in and I'd say
he goes overboard. But that had already happened.
(04:53):
So what's further than overboard?
I guess drowning in the ocean? Well, that's what Louie's doing.
The fat jokes were so mean spirited it was hard to
appreciate if any of them were good.
Lo and behold, she. So she shows up and she's not
fat anymore. Louie's upset that he can't tell
his fat jokes and everyone is super impressed with her.
Alex decides to take her to the same restaurant that they went
(05:13):
to in the first episode and it goes almost as awkwardly.
Apparently Angela has been harboring a crush on him for a
long time and wanted to lose weight to appeal to him.
She doesn't. He feels uncomfortable and
starts smoking in front of her, the joke being that he had just
quit. Good one.
Eventually he turns her down andgets and she gets sad.
He leaves her in the restaurant and she falls off the wagon and
(05:34):
starts on a food binge. Because being fat is essentially
the same thing as being an alcoholic or a drug addict
according to taxes. Now back at the garage, a
heavyset gentleman named Wayne shows up looking for Alex
because he wants to find Angela.And if you're thinking that
doesn't make much sense, you'd be right.
Louis gets all excited because there's a fat person in the
garage and he's got pent up jokes to belittle fat people
(05:56):
with, but he can't find his list.
He still manages to belittle himanyway though.
Neato. Wayne meets up with Alex and
they discuss what's going on, but of course Wayne has a hard
time focusing on the conversation because people are
eating food near him and you know fat people they just, they
just can't focus if there's foodaround.
So Wayne tells Alex that he likes Angela and they decide to
(06:17):
go look. Alex is the one that finds her
in a Diaby type restaurant whereshe's eating some sort of
pastry, maybe a doughnut. And we get one of the long,
long, serious, boring monologuesthat we've come to expect from
Taxi. All about how sad Angela's
childhood was because she didn'tgo to prom because she was too
fat and watched prom from the top of a garbage can.
Now, so far you're like, none ofthis sounds very funny.
(06:39):
You'd be right again. Wayne comes in and and Alex
hooks them up, only to find out that the reason that Angela had
been hesitant to get into a relationship with him was
because he has a wife and four kids.
Which actually did get me. It made me laugh.
I don't know what that says about me.
I know what kind of man you are.Then we close with the gang
looking like they just finished their softball game, and this
(07:00):
saved the episode a little bit. Little bit for me.
It got me twice in a minute and it was just a lot of fun.
They got destroyed and it turns out it's only the first inning.
You know, it was cute. I wish it had been the whole
episode instead of what we got, but that's what we got.
So that's the whole episode. Let's go to the ring.
A wank. The rank is where I ranked the
episode based on five categories, story, acting,
(07:21):
dialogue, episode coherence, andcharacter relatability.
I rank it on a scale of one to five, one being the worst, five
being the best. And then I also have the laugh
counter where I tally up the amount of times the episode made
me laugh out loud and I add thatto the score.
Now the first category is story,which I gave a 3.75.
You know, I feel like you might be shocked by that, but the
story in and of itself is kind of interesting.
(07:41):
An old blind date that Alex wasn't physically attracted to
comes back and has shed all the weight, but he's still not
attracted to her Seemingly then that it wasn't about her weight
in the 1st place, which is good.Obviously the details here went
awry as they leaned way, way tooheavily into the fat jokes.
Let's go to acting, which I gavea 3 1/2 so nobody was
necessarily bad. Tony was fun.
(08:03):
Jeff Conaway is really good in the small doses like this.
I think Suzanne Kent left a little to be desired, but it
wasn't bad. Judd Hirsch was pretty good as
usual. It was all pretty good, not
great. Let's go to Dialogue, which I
gave a 1.25. I was going to do a one for
this, but then the last two minutes of the show made me
laugh three times and really worked.
So not a one. The rest of it is shit though.
(08:25):
That's a good kind either. So let's go to episode
coherence, which I gave a four. Terrible episode, but that
doesn't mean it didn't cohere. I'm still not sure if this
writing team knows they're writing for a sitcom yet, but
you know, whatever. Anyway, Alex butts in, as is his
want, and the story started and ended with softball, which was a
cute little B story, and the crux of the story all cohered
(08:46):
despite it being covered with terrible, horrible jokes
slathered in it, molded by it. Let's go on to the last
category, which is character relatability, which I gave a
2.75. I had a tough time with this
category. Louis is not relatable in this
episode, even as a villain. If this were someone on the
playground in 3rd grade, maybe Icould see it, but he's not even
human in this. Alex's strong desire to be
(09:09):
involved in everything is relatable to an extent, but it
still feels wrong. So you know there's relatability
issues here, so let's go to the laugh counter.
The grand total of OR. It wasn't very funny.
Obviously funny. Always know you're watching a
good sitcom episode when I admityou to laugh a whole 4 times.
So there you have it a grand total of 19.25, which amazingly
(09:30):
puts it just under the thresholdand makes it a disaster piece.
So As for the series average that fell to a 24.72, keeping it
within the rank it and regret ittier.
So thanks everybody for listening and or watching.
If you'd like to see a list of our episode and series rankings,
you can do that on our website at the rank with dot com.
Remember to subscribe, follow review, comment, make
(09:52):
suggestions. Please consider supporting us on
our Patreon site at patreon.com/the Rank podcast,
where you'll get to have access to all of the archived episodes.
But I will leave you with this. Why did the cast need wrist
braces? Why is it from flipping through
all these heavy-handed punch lines?
That was horrible. And you know what?
I know that's a bad joke, but it's better than anything they
(10:13):
did Just say, all right, see you.
A phone conversation with a woman who worked in his
answering at his aunt. Fucking take 3.
Only to find out that the reasonthat Angela had been hesitant to
get into a relationship with himwas because he has a wife and
four kids. Which actually did get me.
It made me laugh. I don't know what that says.
About me. I know what kind of man you are.
(00:30):
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 enjoy consuming
content about it, please subscribe and or follow like the
episodes and comments or e-mail your questions, suggestions and
all that stuff. Please also consider becoming a
Patreon on our patreonpage@patreon.com/the Rank
(00:51):
podcast where you can get all ofthe archived episodes.
Now, today we're going to be ranking the 6th episode of the
second season of Taxi titled TheLighter Side of Angela Matusa,
which was written by Earl Pomerantz and directed by James
Burrows. Now, the series is 45 years old,
so I'm not going to worry about spoilers.
That's your spoiler warning. So just I want to let everybody
know that sort of the premise here is that we're trying to
(01:13):
figure out what's the best sitcom of all time.
So we're ranking all the episodes of different sitcoms
and then averaging out the rankings to figure out what's
the best of all time. So as we continue this, let's go
to the potent notables for this episode Attacks.
So the 28th episode of Taxi was released on Tuesday, October
23rd, 1979. We're back to getting normal
(01:34):
ratings, what with the World Series being over, and Taxi did
pretty well. It was ninth for the week at
23.9. It didn't beat its lead in
Three's Company which had a 27.5, but it did beat every
other ABC show that night, including Happy Days.
Now when we're looking at the first season of Taxi every week,
ABC had most of the top 15 shows, but things continue
(01:55):
turning against ABC 19 79 here 3's company was second and then
8 is enough was 8 ironically, then Taxi, then Happy Days and
Angie. So that's five of 15, which
isn't too bad, but CBS had numbers one and three through 7
and added three more, giving it 8 out of the top 15.
So is the cycle changing? Is a new juggernaut awakening?
(02:18):
I guess we'll find out. Now I've mentioned this potent
notable before, but it bears repeating.
And it's slightly different for this episode.
But at the commercial break, there is a soft playing of the
show's theme song on keyboard. Now the reason for this is that
the music was originally writtenin season 1 to frame Angela's
character, but it was then decided to use the song as the
show's theme music. Now, when I read the synopsis of
(02:41):
this episode, I was not excited because as those of you who've
been with us from the beginning know, we did not like the Blind
date episode. I actually wondered if they
would be crass enough to use another actress to play Angela.
But to my surprise, it was the same actress, Susan Suzanne
Kent. Now Suzanne Kent was one of the
original members of the Groundlings, which I was
(03:02):
surprised to find out, and she created the Sunday Company and
was its founding director, whichmeant nothing to me because I
didn't know what that was. Apparently it's a group within
Groundlings that write and perform a new sketch comedy show
every Sunday night. I did find an interview with
Earl Pomerance, the writer of this episode, when I went
searching to see if Suzanne lostweight for this role.
So here's what I found. Apparently Michael Leeson, the
(03:25):
writer of the first episode Blind Date, which was nominated
for an Emmy for God knows why, based this on a real experience
of Ed Weinberger's who quote after enjoying a phone
conversation with a woman who worked at his answering service,
asked her sight on scene out on a date only to discover that she
looks significantly different than her voice.
Numerous pounds different. End Quote.
Apparently because Suzanne lost a bunch of weight, it triggered
(03:47):
the crack comedy team of writersfor Taxi to make a sequel.
So she had apparently lost weight on her own and they saw
her. Hey, we should make fun of the
fact that you used to be fat. So Nieto gang, do people still
say that? All right, let's go to the
episode overview. So we start off the episode with
Tony trying to recruit a softball.
Of course I knew already what this episode was going to be
about, but man was I hoping thatthat it would mostly be about a
(04:10):
softball. I know I've mentioned this in
previous episodes, but the depiction of company softball
teams and the fact that my mom was on one gave me such an
expectation that I would be playing on softball teams for
the companies I work for and as an adult and that has never
happened. One of the bigger let downs of
becoming an adult I think. Anyway, of course this episode
doesn't stay on the softball. Alex gets a message from Angela
(04:32):
and she's going to stop by the garage.
Apparent. I guess he got the message just
in time because she arrives pretty soon after that.
But before she does, we are reminded that she's fat.
They even give us a flashback tothe episode from season 1 to
remind us of her immensity. Then they start making fat jokes
about it. Then Louis joins in and I'd say
he goes overboard. But that had already happened.
(04:53):
So what's further than overboard?
I guess drowning in the ocean? Well, that's what Louie's doing.
The fat jokes were so mean spirited it was hard to
appreciate if any of them were good.
Lo and behold, she. So she shows up and she's not
fat anymore. Louie's upset that he can't tell
his fat jokes and everyone is super impressed with her.
Alex decides to take her to the same restaurant that they went
(05:13):
to in the first episode and it goes almost as awkwardly.
Apparently Angela has been harboring a crush on him for a
long time and wanted to lose weight to appeal to him.
She doesn't. He feels uncomfortable and
starts smoking in front of her, the joke being that he had just
quit. Good one.
Eventually he turns her down andgets and she gets sad.
He leaves her in the restaurant and she falls off the wagon and
(05:34):
starts on a food binge. Because being fat is essentially
the same thing as being an alcoholic or a drug addict
according to taxes. Now back at the garage, a
heavyset gentleman named Wayne shows up looking for Alex
because he wants to find Angela.And if you're thinking that
doesn't make much sense, you'd be right.
Louis gets all excited because there's a fat person in the
garage and he's got pent up jokes to belittle fat people
(05:56):
with, but he can't find his list.
He still manages to belittle himanyway though.
Neato. Wayne meets up with Alex and
they discuss what's going on, but of course Wayne has a hard
time focusing on the conversation because people are
eating food near him and you know fat people they just, they
just can't focus if there's foodaround.
So Wayne tells Alex that he likes Angela and they decide to
(06:17):
go look. Alex is the one that finds her
in a Diaby type restaurant whereshe's eating some sort of
pastry, maybe a doughnut. And we get one of the long,
long, serious, boring monologuesthat we've come to expect from
Taxi. All about how sad Angela's
childhood was because she didn'tgo to prom because she was too
fat and watched prom from the top of a garbage can.
Now, so far you're like, none ofthis sounds very funny.
(06:39):
You'd be right again. Wayne comes in and and Alex
hooks them up, only to find out that the reason that Angela had
been hesitant to get into a relationship with him was
because he has a wife and four kids.
Which actually did get me. It made me laugh.
I don't know what that says about me.
I know what kind of man you are.Then we close with the gang
looking like they just finished their softball game, and this
(07:00):
saved the episode a little bit. Little bit for me.
It got me twice in a minute and it was just a lot of fun.
They got destroyed and it turns out it's only the first inning.
You know, it was cute. I wish it had been the whole
episode instead of what we got, but that's what we got.
So that's the whole episode. Let's go to the ring.
A wank. The rank is where I ranked the
episode based on five categories, story, acting,
(07:21):
dialogue, episode coherence, andcharacter relatability.
I rank it on a scale of one to five, one being the worst, five
being the best. And then I also have the laugh
counter where I tally up the amount of times the episode made
me laugh out loud and I add thatto the score.
Now the first category is story,which I gave a 3.75.
You know, I feel like you might be shocked by that, but the
story in and of itself is kind of interesting.
(07:41):
An old blind date that Alex wasn't physically attracted to
comes back and has shed all the weight, but he's still not
attracted to her Seemingly then that it wasn't about her weight
in the 1st place, which is good.Obviously the details here went
awry as they leaned way, way tooheavily into the fat jokes.
Let's go to acting, which I gavea 3 1/2 so nobody was
necessarily bad. Tony was fun.
(08:03):
Jeff Conaway is really good in the small doses like this.
I think Suzanne Kent left a little to be desired, but it
wasn't bad. Judd Hirsch was pretty good as
usual. It was all pretty good, not
great. Let's go to Dialogue, which I
gave a 1.25. I was going to do a one for
this, but then the last two minutes of the show made me
laugh three times and really worked.
So not a one. The rest of it is shit though.
(08:25):
That's a good kind either. So let's go to episode
coherence, which I gave a four. Terrible episode, but that
doesn't mean it didn't cohere. I'm still not sure if this
writing team knows they're writing for a sitcom yet, but
you know, whatever. Anyway, Alex butts in, as is his
want, and the story started and ended with softball, which was a
cute little B story, and the crux of the story all cohered
(08:46):
despite it being covered with terrible, horrible jokes
slathered in it, molded by it. Let's go on to the last
category, which is character relatability, which I gave a
2.75. I had a tough time with this
category. Louis is not relatable in this
episode, even as a villain. If this were someone on the
playground in 3rd grade, maybe Icould see it, but he's not even
human in this. Alex's strong desire to be
(09:09):
involved in everything is relatable to an extent, but it
still feels wrong. So you know there's relatability
issues here, so let's go to the laugh counter.
The grand total of OR. It wasn't very funny.
Obviously funny. Always know you're watching a
good sitcom episode when I admityou to laugh a whole 4 times.
So there you have it a grand total of 19.25, which amazingly
(09:30):
puts it just under the thresholdand makes it a disaster piece.
So As for the series average that fell to a 24.72, keeping it
within the rank it and regret ittier.
So thanks everybody for listening and or watching.
If you'd like to see a list of our episode and series rankings,
you can do that on our website at the rank with dot com.
Remember to subscribe, follow review, comment, make
(09:52):
suggestions. Please consider supporting us on
our Patreon site at patreon.com/the Rank podcast,
where you'll get to have access to all of the archived episodes.
But I will leave you with this. Why did the cast need wrist
braces? Why is it from flipping through
all these heavy-handed punch lines?
That was horrible. And you know what?
I know that's a bad joke, but it's better than anything they
(10:13):
did Just say, all right, see you.
A phone conversation with a woman who worked in his
answering at his aunt. Fucking take 3.
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