60 best sitcoms of all time

6. Taxi

Over five seasons, Taxi won a whopping 18 Emmy Awards; that’s more than three Emmys for each season. That’s some impressive consistency for any series. But Taxi was sort of Cheers before Cheers (it was on the air four years earlier and ended the year after Cheers began). This was a working-class workplace comedy that stuffed a bunch of talented people into one primary setting and let them go nuts.

Taxi had the distinction of holding onto its six biggest cast members for the entire run of the show. Judd Hirsch, Danny DeVito, Marilu Henner, Tony Danza, Andy Kaufman and Christopher Lloyd appeared in all five seasons although Lloyd wasn’t credited as a main cast member until Season 3. That created something special for the audience as we were able to enjoy the same group of characters from start to finish and watch the actors evolve along with them. It’s no surprise that many folks from Taxi went onto later sitcoms, because you could see how they got better year after year – that is if they weren’t great already.

The show could get wildly out of control sometimes and be surprisingly poignant in others, but it rarely disappointed. Taxi was populated by characters that we could identify with and feel like we might get into a cab with someday – and we’d be totally fine with that.

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