Danny DeVito’s Hit Show Axed Him After One Season and He Just Turned 80

Danny DeVito's Taxi turned a cab company into must-see 1970s television for five glorious seasons.

One cast member never made it past the first season, quietly disappearing before the show became a legend.

Now he has turned 80, and the actor Danny DeVito's show cast aside is finally stepping back into the spotlight.

Randall Carver Learned His Character Was Gone Before Season Two

The man is Randall Carver.

Back in 1978, he climbed into the Sunshine Cab Company garage as John Burns, a wide-eyed Midwestern transplant surrounded by New York wise guys.

Taxi was an instant smash, built around Judd Hirsch, Danny DeVito's foul-mouthed dispatcher Louie De Palma, Tony Danza, Marilu Henner and a young Christopher Lloyd waiting in the wings.

Carver's character got lost in that shuffle.

When season two rolled around, Lloyd came aboard full-time and John Burns simply vanished, no goodbye episode, no explanation on screen.

Carver later said the writers' room never figured out what to do with a Midwestern kid on a show stacked with East Coast talent.

"They had all East Coast writers," Carver said. "They should have picked some writers from the Midwest."

He put it even more bluntly years later, comparing himself to the most famous cast-off in rock and roll history.

"I was the best of Taxi – the Pete Best," Carver said.

The Part That Almost Ended His Career Never Did

Getting cut from a hit show in its first year usually finishes an actor.

Carver refused to let it finish him.

He landed the lead in Six O'Clock Follies, a Vietnam-set military comedy that had real momentum until NBC pulled the plug following the Iranian hostage crisis.

He kept working steadily through the decades, picking up guest spots on Malcolm in the Middle and a role in the Oscar-winning There Will Be Blood.

In 1999, DeVito produced Man on the Moon, the Andy Kaufman biopic, and brought Carver back to walk through a recreated Sunshine Cab garage alongside his old castmates.

It was as close to a reunion as the Taxi castoff would get.

Carver was hardly the first performer chewed up by an ensemble comedy before the cameras even found their rhythm.

Lisa Kudrow was let go from Frasier just three days into filming the pilot, losing the role of Roz Doyle to Peri Gilpin.

Tamzin Merchant was dropped from Game of Thrones after shooting the original pilot as Daenerys Targaryen, with HBO handing the role to Emilia Clarke.

Hollywood has never been shy about cutting its losses fast, and Randall Carver found that out before most viewers had even memorized his character's name.

https://twitter.com/codyghosthost/status/1991525843919859802

A Cab Ride Worth Remembering

Carver never got the syndication checks or the reunion specials that Hirsch, Danza and Kane still enjoy.

He got one season, a handful of episodes, and a punchline about the Beatles' original drummer that he learned to tell on himself.

That takes a certain kind of grit, the same grit that kept him booking work long after network executives decided his character wasn't worth writing for anymore.

Compare that to what happened to Kudrow and Merchant.

Kudrow bounced back from her Frasier cut almost immediately, landing Phoebe Buffay on Friends within the same year, and Merchant went on to steady work in film and television without ever facing the public "whatever happened to him" question Carver has answered for decades.

Carver's path was slower and lonelier, four decades of guest spots and character work instead of one lightning-strike second chance, and he kept showing up anyway.

Taxi fans who grew up laughing at Louie De Palma's insults may not remember John Burns at all, and that is exactly the point.

The show that had no use for him went on to win eighteen Emmy Awards and land a spot in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, proof of how completely Hollywood can erase a man and still call itself a classic.

The show survived without him, but Randall Carver survived Hollywood on his own terms, and at 80 years old he is still around to tell the Midwestern kid's side of the story.

Sources:

• "I Was the Guy Kicked Off 'Taxi' After the First Season," Cracked.
• Randall Carver, Wikipedia biography.
• "25 actors who were fired or quit hit TV shows in their first seasons," WFTV.
• "See the 'Taxi' cast reunite to honor Danny DeVito more than 40 years after the show ended," Today.
• "'Taxi' Cast Reunites 40 Years After End Of Comedy Series," Deadline.