Welcome to the weekly TV thread. I was not happy with the weak commenter turnout last Thursday. However, I enjoyed reading lonestarr357’s memories of watching Nelvana animation, which I discussed at length last Thursday, and briefly interacting with Michael Hirsh and Clive A. Smith, two of Nelvana’s co-founders.

Next Thursday, I’ll be discussing how much I love Tim Meadows’s scenes in Peacemaker’s current season. In the meantime, the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is “Brooklyn Heights Boogie,” Bob James’s expanded version of one of his themes from Taxi, my favorite out of the three or four shows I regularly watched on Nick at Nite, a brand that turned 40 in July.

Taxi was co-created by James L. Brooks and his old Mary Tyler Moore Show colleagues Stan Daniels, David Davis, and Ed. Weinberger. (Hot take: I prefer it over Mary Tyler Moore.) In 1983, as Taxi’s run on network TV was winding down—it still astounds me that Danny DeVito’s current sitcom, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, just finished its 17th season, while DeVito, Judd Hirsch, Marilu Henner, Tony Danza, and Andy Kaufman starred in Taxi for only five seasons—James rounded up a bunch of his Taxi themes, including “Angela,” the melancholy (but beloved by Souls of Mischief, which brilliantly sampled it, and R&B singer Tweet, who added lyrics to it in 2005) main and end title theme.

For the Tappan Zee/Columbia Records smooth jazz album The Genie: Themes & Variations from the TV Series Taxi, James either recorded expanded versions of his Taxi instrumentals or, in the case of “Angela,” finally released the version we’re more familiar with from TV. I fondly remember the “Brooklyn Heights Boogie” melody from all those stock footage shots of some faceless driver who was pretending to be either Hirsch, Henner, or Danza while hustling through New York traffic.

In July, I was so preoccupied with the first season of Patience and the deaths of Lalo Schifrin, Mark Snow, and Malcolm-Jamal Warner that I wasn’t aware that Nick at Nite turned 40, so I want to discuss Nick at Nite now.

Gregiffer Stevens writes and narrates for the Pop Arena YouTube channel one of my favorite series of video essays: Nick Knacks, a series about—in chronological order—every single program that aired on Nickelodeon, the first of many cable channels for kids. (Nick has endured competition from the Disney Channel and Cartoon Network, but now its days are numbered.) Nick Knacks caught my attention because I was into Nick for a couple of years when I was a kid. Nick was the only place where I could watch reruns of the Filmation version of Star Trek, which was the subject of a really good 41-minute Nick Knacks essay in 2019, and SCTV.

I first discovered SCTV on Nick at Nite, the programming block that started out targeting the boomer parents of Nick viewers in 1985 and later changed its focus to the sitcoms that were adored by the Gen-X parents of Nick viewers. I enjoyed SCTV’s sketches—while hating the racist ones where Dave Thomas pretended to be Asian (Thomas loved to do yellowface on SCTV a whole fucking lot).

Even though I outgrew the kids’ programming on Nick, I continued to watch Nick at Nite, especially when it acquired Taxi in 1994 and kicked off Taxi’s run by airing nothing but Taxi for an entire November week called “Taxi Appreciation Week.” About a year before Nick at Nite acquired Taxi, I borrowed from the library The Taxi Book: The Complete Guide to Television’s Most Lovable Cabbies by Jeff Sorensen and then fell in love with Taxi when KTVU aired it at 1:30am on weeknights.

Over at the now-defunct Solute comments section, I once wrote, “Taxi is quintessential James L. Brooks. A lot of the show’s ‘City life is this close to breaking me, and no one understands’ vibe later seeped into Broadcast News, particularly the Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks characters, and As Good as It Gets.”

Taxi had one major imperfection: As Nina Chambers, a cabbie who hopes to become a Broadway star in the 1982 episode “Nina Loves Alex,” special guest star Charlayne Woodard was more charming than Jeff Conaway, who was fired from Taxi in 1981 for drug abuse, ever was as Bobby Wheeler, a cabbie who, just like Nina, wanted to become a famous actor. It sucked that Nina never appeared again on Taxi.

Prior to “Nina Loves Alex,” Woodard worked with Brooks, Daniels, Davis, and Weinberger when she made her screen debut as a girl in 1943 Harlem who clashes with her wicked stepsisters in the 1978 made-for-TV musical Cindy, the four Taxi creators’ all-Black version of Cinderella. (Yep, 19 years before Brandy starred as Cinderella on ABC, Woodard starred as a Black Cinderella on the same network. Thanks to the invaluable Reelblack One account, Brooks, Daniels, Davis, and Weinberger’s hilarious movie, which was shot on videotape instead of film and was a Disney Channel staple in the ’90s, is in its entirety on YouTube.) It’s a shame that Woodard—best known to younger viewers as Sister Peg on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and as Damon’s kindly dance teacher on Pose—was never added to Taxi’s all-white and mostly male cast. Otherwise, Taxi was a perfect sitcom.

I was so into Taxi that I stayed up on school nights just to record a few of KTVU’s Taxi reruns on the VCR because the show wasn’t widely syndicated at the time. (In syndication, it was never as popular as Cheers, the show Glen and Les Charles co-created with frequent Taxi episode director James Burrows right after the Charleses left the Taxi writing staff, as well as a show that made stars out of three actors who had memorable guest roles on Taxi: Ted Danson, Rhea Perlman, and the late George Wendt.) I was relieved when Nick at Nite picked up Taxi. I didn’t have to stay up late anymore.

Taxi had a long and healthy run on Nick at Nite. Its reruns aired over there until 2001. I always thought that Nick at Nite should have done a marathon of Taxi episodes about the love lives of Alex, Elaine, Tony, Bobby, Reverend Jim, Louie, Latka, and Simka. The channel should have called it “Nik-Nik at Nite.”

At the end of last year, Stevens, who goes by non-binary pronouns, began Nick Knacks at Nite, a series of essays about every single program that aired on Nick at Nite. I’m not sure if they will ever be able to reach the period of Nick at Nite when it introduced Xennials and millennials to Taxi.

Stevens hasn’t even gotten to the period when Nick started to become a leader in producing quality animation. However, for a series of Nick Knacks Sample Platter shorts, they’re taking requests from their patrons, many of whom have asked them to jump ahead into time and analyze their favorite episodes of animated Nick shows, and thanks to those patrons, Stevens has covered episodes like Hey Arnold!’s moving 1996 Christmas episode, a great moment for Vietnamese American representation, and Star Trek: Prodigy’s well-written “Time Amok” episode. Stevens called “Time Amok,” which was written by first-season Prodigy staff writer Nikhil S. Jayaram, “a perfect example of Star Trek: Prodigy’s strengths: how it handles complex science fiction ideas in a way a younger audience can work with, how well-realized its characters are, and how it manages to stand on its own in an ocean of Trek.”

In the meantime, there hasn’t been a Nick Knacks essay that has bored me (although Stevens’s nearly 100-minute essay on their favorite Nick original series, The Adventures of Pete & Pete, an essay that attempted, in an unusual framing device, to emulate the narration segments from Pete & Pete, went on longer than I would have liked).

My favorite Nick Knacks essays include a 2018 essay that praised the early ’80s Nick teen talk show Livewire and its 1983 interview with R.E.M. (19 minutes), a 2020 essay on Mister Ed (41 minutes, 13 of which were spent trashing Mister Ed), a 2021 overview of the complicated history of Looney Tunes theatrical shorts on TV (55 minutes), and an essay from March on Linda Ellerbee and her groundbreaking, Emmy-winning Nick News series (45 minutes). Nick News was a good example of adult minds at Nick being able to figure out how to speak to kids about the difficulties of the adult world without talking down to them. Stevens’s 2023 essay on Adventures of Superman, which aired on Nick at Nite from 1991 to 1995 and also surfaced on Nick’s Saturday morning schedule for about a year, is another well-made essay (41 minutes).

The amount of research Stevens does for each Nick Knacks essay is incredible. Stevens must be protected at all costs.

Last month on Bluesky, Nick at Nite’s plans to remove Friends, a Nick at Nite staple since 2011, from its lineup (it changed its mind earlier this month about removing Friends) caused Stevens to ask their followers, “What do you think Nick at Nite should be in 2025? A return to 50s/60s/70s retro television? A catered list of shows to appeal to modern Gen X/Millennial/Gen Z parents? Something new entirely?” Nick at Nite itself was the subject of a Nick Knacks essay Stevens did in 2019.

One person said that if they took control of Nick at Nite, they would turn it into a home for reruns of Nick originals from their childhood (the block currently consists only of reruns of Friends, The Big Bang Theory, and Modern Family), while some of Stevens’s followers said that cable TV is dead. They don’t think it’s likely that Nick at Nite will ever go back to being the Nick at Nite that introduced younger viewers like myself to sitcoms and sketch comedy shows from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, especially when Catchy Comedy and MeTV are currently succeeding as present-day versions of late ’80s/early ’90s Nick at Nite.

I stopped being a cable TV subscriber many years ago. I don’t watch linear TV anymore. I like how much control I have over what I want to watch after I ditched linear TV.

If I want to rewatch SCTV or Taxi, I don’t need a Nick at Nite-style linear TV channel or a FAST channel. I’ll just go to whatever Internet Archive or YouTube accounts are posting videotaped copies of full episodes of SCTV (which are better than Shout! Factory’s DVD compilations of SCTV episodes that were re-edited to remove music the Second City couldn’t clear) or whatever streaming service is carrying Taxi (last year, it could be found on both Paramount+, where it remains because it was a Paramount Television production, and the now-defunct Freevee). The only thing I miss about late ’80s/early ’90s Nick at Nite is its irreverent promos. A lot of them were funnier than the black-and-white shows they promoted.

The era that resulted in the “TV Generation Almanac” promos and Nick at Nite’s fake interview with “the Back of Patty Duke’s Head” was the funniest and cleverest era in the history of the marketing of antiquated shows I wouldn’t have given the time of day to otherwise. That era will never happen again. The end of linear TV is a big reason why.

Today’s prompt: Did you quit linear TV like I did?