HBO's Taxicab Confessions takes viewers for a ride.

On the rare occasion when I pry open my wallet and spring for a New York taxicab, the ride usually takes place in silence, whether because of language differences between rider and cabbie, or just a mutual desire for a moment of quiet in an always-noisy town. But to watch the eleventh installment of the ongoing HBO documentary Taxicab Confessions (Saturday, Feb. 5 at 10:15 P.M. ET), you'd think every cab whizzing by was jampacked with hot young couples and even hotter drivers trading raunchy anecdotes. And I mean really raunchy: a post-op transsexual describes the precise shape and color of her new, um, womanly endowment. A drunk Irish tourist grows nostalgic about the 36 double-Ds of a favorite stripper. A scruffy party girl gives her new love some (offscreen) oral service, then suddenly stops to sulk about her erotic rival:  "But what about Astro?" "What about Astro?" her boyfriend dazedly replies.

The format of Taxicab Confessions, dreamed up in 1995 by brothers Joe and Harry Gantz, is tantalizingly simple: affix a tiny hidden camera to the roof of a car for hire, pick up the oddest assortment of passengers you can find, and edit the results down to a fifty-minute, R-rated version of Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth. This show has developed a cult following over its decade of existence, with the last six installments filmed in Las Vegas. Saturday's Taxicab Confessions is the first one made in New York since the city's de-sleaze-ification by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and there's a visible overcompensation at work, an attempt to drum up a spirit of nocturnal debauchery in a town that's become more Friends than Taxi Driver. The cabbies drive around a New York City whose only geographical features are flashing neon signs ("Girls! Girls! Girls!") and avant-garde strip clubs (oh, that bar where a near-naked Asian woman swims around in a giant fishtank? Nice place, right next to my tailor's.)

The viral spread of reality TV has suspended this kind of vaguely titillating exercise in a strange grey zone, somewhere between cinema verite and plain old-fashioned porn. Grab a cab to your local video store, where you can find much better examples of both. ... 10:24 a.m.

Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2005

Because of an unforeseen snafu with my TiVo® brand digital video recorder, I only just now got a chance to watch Conan O'Brien's eulogy to Carson on Late Night last night. When I discovered it hadn't taped, I went to NBC studios in Rockefeller Center and begged them to give me a copy of the broadcast, and boy, was it worth it. Despite, or perhaps because of, its touching awkwardness, Conan's 12-minute tribute provided a telling glimpse into the generational gulf that separates boomers Letterman and Leno (born in 1947 and 1950, respectively) from slacker Conan (born in 1963), and the past from the future of late-night TV. Conan's reminiscences of Carson were not, like Letterman's or Leno's, memories of professional comradeship and support; they were snapshots of a young comic's brief, fleeting encounters with a distant, if benevolent, celebrity.

Visibly consulting his notes, the usually goofy Conan (for some reason, Conan is one of those celebrities you always think of by his first name—why is that?) grew quiet as he told a few anecdotes about his own encounters with Carson over the years, delivered in a shaky voice that at times seemed near breaking. One story involved a young Conan, as a writer on The Simpsons, being so awed when Johnny Carson dropped by to do a guest voiceover that he accidentally gave his hero the wrong directions out of the Fox parking lot. Another story described a birthday party for NBC chief Bob Wright at which Conan, then a fledgling talk-show host, was asked to drop by and "be funny" for a few minutes, only to be told that his standup act would be followed by an appearance by—gulp—Johnny Carson. Somehow Conan muddled through his bit, and later Carson gave him an invaluable piece of professional advice: "Be yourself. That's the only way it can work."

Conan ended by recounting a phone call he made to Carson last October, after he had just been named as Jay Leno's eventual successor on the Tonight Show. He spoke of how "electrifying" it was, at the age of 41, to be called "kiddo" on the phone by the likes of Johnny Carson. Conan may still need some polishing around the edges, but you can tell a lot about people from the way they mourn, and based on the gentle gravity that he brought to the desk last night, his assumption of the Tonight Show post in 2009 may finally make that show worth watching again. ... 1:20 p.m.

Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2005

NBC announced today that Medium, the network's month-old midseason replacement drama about a crime-solving psychic, will be picked up for a second season (because of the show's unexpectedly high ratings, there will also be an additional three episodes added to this season's original 13).

I'm sure a lot of people are tuning into Medium (Mondays, 10 p.m. ET) because of the subject matter: The luscious Patricia Arquette is Allison DuBois, a character based on a real-life psychic who joins forces with the Phoenix, Ariz., police department to enlist the help of the dead in solving their own murders. Psychics are very hot right now (and Patricia Arquette always has been). But take it from a hard-boiled skeptic who can't stand the whole woo-woo, paranormal, I-see-dead-people trend in pop culture: Even if you have no truck with unexplained phenomena, Medium is a really good show.