Taxicab Confessions
Taxicab Confessions is a television series of hidden camera documentaries that have aired on HBO since January 1995. In segments taped in New York City and Las Vegas, the taxi drivers are also producers who steer both the vehicle and the conversations with passengers. When passengers enter the cab, they are recorded with several small cameras hidden in the taxi. The producer prompts passengers into discussing their past and/or present circumstances. This has led some participants to reflect on their life, recalling extreme tragedies or triumphs. Much is verbally or visually graphic, including explicit sex talk and sex acts performed in the back seat. At the end of the taxi ride, passengers are asked to sign waivers allowing the hidden camera footage to be used on the program, and footage of this revelation is sometimes seen during the closing credits.
Episodes
This inaugural episode of the Taxicab Confessions series, premiered on HBO in January 1995, and went on to win the Emmy Award for Outstanding Informational Special. Far ahead of its time, this show allowed viewers to watch as unsuspecting cab riders in New York City revealed their most vulnerable sides. Memorable rides include an off-duty trauma cop who recounts scenes of death he has witnessed, a homeless man who explains his decline, and a young woman who talks about the joys of body piercing.
More personal lifestyles and secrets are revealed in this episode, including a pair of young women flirting with their bisexuality and each other, an outgoing African American body-builder who seems surprised that the cabbie even picked him up, and an AIDS victim coping with his impending death.
Air date unavailable
Unaware that they're being taped, late-night, New York City taxicab passengers reveal their innermost thoughts and secrets as they talk to their drivers. The passengers include a woman who reveals her problems with an unfaithful boyfriend and confesses to having cheated on him and shooting a boyfriend in a fit of rage, a party guy and his free-spirited girlfriend who allude to bisexual experiences, a cocaine addict who is desperate to find enough money to buy a $15 bag of coke, a hooker who tells the story of her escape from a serial killer, a couple whose plan of having sex in the upper deck of Shea Stadium was nixed by security guards, an elderly Jamaican widow whose 18-year-old daughter was killed in a robbery attempt and must now care for an 8-year-old granddaughter, and an attractive Hispanic transvestite waiting for the opportunity to have a sex-change operation.
Air date unavailable
The very first episode to take place in Las Vegas and the producers found more outrageous people in "Sin City". In this episode, a young man and his older girlfriend add to their list of "places they've done it" and a sweet, sentimental veteran pilot of the Spanish Civil War who remembers losing his best friend.
"Taxicab Confessions" returns to the streets of New York City for the first time after an eight-year hiatus. It records more intimate nocturnal conversations with actual taxicab passengers - chronicling a disparate group of revelers, fetishists, romantics and lonely hearts as they spill their innermost secrets to anonymous cab drivers.
Air date unavailable
Heading back to the familiar streets of the Big Apple, the 13th edition of Taxicab Confessions: New York, New York Part 3 presents more intimate, nocturnal conversations with actual NYC taxicab passengers.
