Taxicab Confessions

The idea started with a cab. Joe Gantz had driven one in college and recorded his passengers, and years later he and his brother Harry folded that experience into ideas from "A Life at Random," an earlier pilot of theirs that had gone unsold. HBO's documentary chief Sheila Nevins picked it up — she was not initially sold on it either — and Taxicab Confessions premiered in January 1995 under the network's America Undercover banner.

The production was more deliberate than the loose, accidental feel of the footage suggests. Several small cameras and concealed microphones were hidden inside a real licensed taxi. The drivers were real licensed cabbies, chosen from hundreds of candidates for a specific quality: the ability to listen. They wore an earpiece, and producers trailing in a chase vehicle fed them questions. The show's whole effect depends on the driver never seeming like an interviewer, which is why casting people who were genuinely good at shutting up mattered more than anything else.

The consent worked backwards, and that is the part worth sitting with. Passengers were not told anything until the ride was over. At the end, they were asked to sign a release allowing the footage to be used. Not everyone signed. The wrestler Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka told his whole story and then declined the release when it was put in front of him. Over time the producers found that the person who got the best results asking was the driver, not a production assistant sent to intercept people on the sidewalk.

Where the cab drove was decided by politics and by statute, not by scenery. The original New York run lasted only a couple of years. Harry Gantz put the departure down to "a public and behind-the-scenes struggle between the mayor's office and Time Warner," noting the irony that the reason the city officially gave was that it "didn't like the way Taxicab Confessions portrayed New York." The production decamped to Las Vegas for roughly eight years — which is to say the rest of the 90s and well beyond — chosen because it was a round-the-clock cab town in a state whose one-party consent law let you record someone who didn't know it. It eventually returned to New York the same way it had left, through the mayor's office: this time via the city's own "Made in New York" production incentive.

It was never a weekly series, which is why memories of it are hazy. It ran as roughly annual feature-length editions, with "best of" compilations in between — the Hollywood Reporter called the November 2008 installment the show's thirteenth edition. It won the Emmy for Outstanding Informational Special in 1995, its first year, and picked up further nominations in 1997 and again in 2001 and 2002, by which point the Television Academy had invented a reality category the show predated. The last installment, "The City That Never Sleeps," aired on 9 December 2010. Its legacy claim is disputed by the people best placed to make it: Nevins called it "the precursor to reality television," while Harry Gantz has said plainly, "People sometimes give us credit for creating reality television, but we don't want that credit."