In 1996, after two seasons, HBO’s “Taxicab Confessions,” the mother of all reality television, was run out of New York City by a pettifogging official from the Taxi and Limousine Commission. Since then, the show’s special taxi, which has no divider between the front and back seats and is outfitted with invisible cameras, has been prowling the clean streets of Las Vegas.
As an American totem, the taxi has always belonged more to the bustle of New York than to the anomie of Las Vegas. In its tenth year, which débuts on February 5th, “Taxicab Confessions” returns to the gritty hubbub of the New York night. The homecoming was carefully orchestrated by HBO’s president of documentaries, Sheila Nevins, who saw an opportunity in the election of Michael Bloomberg as mayor, in 2001. Soon after Bloomberg’s new commissioner of Film, Theatre, and Broadcasting, Katherine Oliver, came on board, in 2002, Nevins messengered over the Emmy she’d won in 1995 for “Taxicab Confessions.” “I don’t know you, you don’t know me,” Nevins wrote in an accompanying note. “But I’d like to win another of these and bring the show back to New York.” Oliver sent back the Emmy, but she took up the challenge, which she says was “a no-brainer,” adding that she had no trouble persuading the Mayor to welcome the show back. “He was thrilled to support it: it’s about job creation and about capturing the New York experience.”
Nevins is a handsome, nervy woman with frosty hair. She earned an M.F.A. in directing from the Yale School of Drama, and she created “Taxicab Confessions” after watching a tame pilot about people getting in and out of taxis during the day. “To me, the city gets hot and sticky and electric when the lights go out,” she said. “I like night. I think night is wicked and exciting.”
These days, as anyone who has recently hailed a yellow cab knows, it’s hard to get a New York cabbie to listen to anything but his cell phone. “Taxicab Confessions” uses only licensed drivers, and they have to audition for the job. “They have to feel what the rider is saying,” Nevins said. In the new edition of the show, we see people responding to life after September 11th. A woman tells her driver about a friend who survived being buried in the rubble of the Twin Towers. “I’m worried about him now—he was screaming with anger at me,” she says, wiping away tears. Another passenger, a Latino man, brags about his devotion to his blond transsexual lover, who is seated beside him. And an obese young African-American woman serenades the effeminate white man she is taking home to bed for the first time. “One boy, one steady boy,” she sings with feeling. The finale features two young women, “fired up,” they say, after a night of karaoke, stripping off their bras and leaning out the cab windows to sing “I Will Survive.”
“Yes, it’s voyeuristic. Yes, it’s lowbrow,” Nevins said. “Every creation starts from a certain kind of voyeurism, whether you’re listening to your head or listening in. I love to overhear conversations at other tables in restaurants, or to watch people go by in cars when they don’t know you’re looking. They’re little epiphanies.
“After all,” she went on, “does life make sense? No. So the only way you have any chance of learning anything about why you’re here is by listening hard to how other people grapple with it. I think Shakespeare would have liked this show. He was a voyeur. He listened.”