Episode 68 - Jim Joins The Network

Hi. You see that guy with it now? He's an actor driver and the only camp driver. In his place. Good evening and welcome tonight, mister Walter's a taxi podcast.

I'm HP your co host, and with me as always is my co host, Father Malone. Father Malone, Hawaii you This evening. HB Television is a young man's game, and. They don't come much younger than the guest star we're going to talk about. He I described him as impossibly young, and we'll get to there.

But we're talking, of course about Taxi Season four, episode four. Jim joins the network, written by David Lloyd and directed by know Him. Pick Lick sounds fake, Yeah, it sounds like a fake name, but he's a real guy who was both an actor and a director. So if you get him to say his name, he'll lose his powers and Superman will have won the day. Good Call, Good Call.

Only a very narrow subsection of our audience get that joke, but those who do will be laughing even now, they'll still be laughing at it. Welcome super Nerds, there you go. Welcome you all are welcome here. Reminder we're doing these shows in broadcast order and not in order of filming. We begin this episode follow alone and the inside of a cab.

Jim is driving two passengers. It's a man and a woman. The man is played by none other then, as I said, an impossibly young Martin Short. As we've mentioned before, he was involved in another James Brooks production, The Associates, which so he was already known to the taxi team. That show was canceled in nineteen eighty, so this appearance would have been post cancelation.

But you know, everybody knows Martin Short from Only Murders in the Building and SNL and SCTV, but this was before all of that. I think he was I want to say he was probably thirty years old at this point. He looks like a teenager. He's so young. On there's a baby here.

You can easily see him in Godspell when you look look at this version of Martin Short. Yeah, there's a there's a documentary coming out on Godspell. I'm well aware, and it's fucking about time, and I'm mad that you and I didn't make it. It looks fantastic. I think Eugene Levy is prominently involved.

I'm sure Andrea Martin must be in there like every every Paul Schaeffer, no doubt. Oh yeah, well he was the music director, was he not? He was. I'm reading his biography right his autobiographer right now. Is it any good?

Or is it like a lot of like, hey, that cat could play. It is very very Paul Schaeffer, while at the same time very informative. It's been in my cue. I just have not had a chance to read it. Maybe I will anyway.

The man and the woman in the back of the cab are TV executives, and Martin Short's character's name is Mitch Harris. He's trying to convince the woman that she's a good executive. She's feeling low, she's uncertain if she's qualified for the job, she's whatever. But he's this guy's basically trying to buck her up and saying, no, you're good, you deserve to be there, and blah blah blah. But the woman, whose name is Janine, is nervous about something that she has to do.

She finally gets the courage to tell Mitch that, Okay, what I have to do is if the ratings don't get better, I'm gonna have to fire you, which sends him into kind of a little bit of a tailspin. She thanks Mitch profusely for all of his advice, and then she gets out of the cab at her stop. At this point, Mitch's despondent and Jim, who's driving, is trying to make a little bit of small talk. Jim asks if he's in television. Jim goes on to say he's always wondered how the networks decide how to put shows on the air.

Mitch replies that it's very scientific. They take into account a lot of different metrics. Jim counters by asking why they took Star Trek off the air since that was his favorite show. His favorite show, Jim's favorite show was Star Trek, Father Malone peculiar. Is it not poetic?

Almost? It's amazing. It's as if the Star Trek people watched Taxi and saw Jim say that, and then years later went, hey, you know it'd be good. He will be a kling On someday. That guy would make the perfect Klingon commander.

He is. He is the perfect Klingon commander. He absolutely is an And we've talked already a about trek Fest, which is going on right now over on midnight viewing Father Malone's podcast, and we are going through all the Trek movies, and in fact, we've already gone through in exhaustive detail Star Trek three, where Christopher Lloyd appears as Commander Krug and in our estimation, is one of the best Klingons ever to grace the big screen. Don't take our word for it. Watch the movie, then listen to the podcast.

They proceed to drive to Mitch's apartment, continuing this small talk Jim Matt by the way, before I even get to that, it's one of the best line readings, and I'm not going to do it justice. But as Jim is talking about how his favorite show is Star Trek, there's this weird line reading where he says, I've always loved Star Trek, like he gets this like distant look in his eyes, and there's this pause between Star Trek and everything else. It's a distant tone in his voice. He's long gone. What I love is.

He's asked question, and Martin Short is consistently trying to give him answers, but he's in a reverie about Star Trek the entire time. He's not hearing anything. And then when he gives him eventually tries to change the subject. Then he starts talking about his the least favorite Star Trek character. He remembers the Romulin who wasn't the actors fault.

Right, It just he said things that no Romulin would ever say. It's very funny and very prescient, considering Christopher Lloyd would become part of the Star Trek canon in just a few years, just. And considering this is an episode about Jim predicting the future, so here he might be seeing himself in Star Trek. This is we should mention that. So we already had Jim the Psychic, which I believe was episode one of this season four.

So now we're in episode four and they're continuing this notion of Jim being a psychic. That's where we're headed with this. Jim asks him are there any new shows coming out? And Mitch mentions two coming on tonight. He says the first one the network is very excited about it.

It's called Hometown Girl, which is their most popular daytime soap opera. What a terrible idea. First of all, who wants to watch a soap opera in primetime? Well? What about Dynasty?

What about Dallas? Those are all primetime soap operas. Those were primetime soap operas. What he's saying is, basically, we're going to have tonight as a special, a two hour general hospital. No thank you, just saying like what happens is very very specific and has to be dealt with.

But I'm just saying, if you were to tell me we're putting a soap opera on at fucking nine pm tonight, I would say, no one is going to watch that. The second one Mitch says is in trouble. He says, it's a musical variety program called the Pittsburgh Steelers at Marine Land. If are you kidding? That sounds fucking great.

What are they going to do at Marine Land? Who is going to fall into the dolphin tank? For listeners of a certain age, and there's probably no one listening to this that are very very young. But you have to remember that these kinds of crossovers were the rule and not the exception. We had things like the Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island.

That was a real show that played on prime time. Not to mention the one million variety shows that there were. Look, this is well beyond before the Internet. This is well beyond before cable television, where you actually had a choice of channels in different avenues to get word out there and publicize things. If you were a musician in the middle of the nineteen seventies, you were either touring or they're playing your stuff on the radio, or if you wanted to get on you could do a guest spot, or you could do one of these variety shows where you could do three of your songs and then the rest of it was just Bruce Falanche written nonsense.

The variety shows were super popular at this point. The Star Wars Holiday Special is a variety show. People knock it and talk about how horrible it is. But that again, that was the rule and not the exception. That seemed like I can't miss proposition.

So Donnie and Marie was a variety show. You know, Captain and Taneil had a variety show. The Brady Bunch went from being a network sitcom. They had a variety show where inexplicably, the family decides to become a variety show musical act, even Mike Brady, who didn't really seem to know how to dance or sing. But anyway, let's not Judge, Pink Lady and Jeff Do you remember that I the Japanese duo, this pair of Japanese women who were like huge pop sensations in Japan, and then they just gave them a variety show, paired them up with comedian Jeff Altman, and surprise, neither of them could speak English.

That was a Siden Marty Kroft production. And the thing of that is, because I just recently heard about this coincidentally, is that Sid and Marty Kroft didn't understand that the Pink Lady. Is that the name of the group. Is it the pink Ladies? I don't remember if it was just pink Lady.

I think it was just pink Lady. They didn't understand that Pink Lady did not speak English. They had to write out their dialogue phonetically because they couldn't understand English. At what point do you not realize your stars do not speak English? Too late?

Was everyone really stoned? Is that the case? Did? They just kept taking everyone's word for it. It ran for a ridiculously short amount of time, like two episodes, five episodes with one unaired episode, so it was effectively six episodes, but they only ran five of them.

It's not far fetched to think of something like the Pittsburgh Steelers at Marineland. I probably would have watched it when I was that age. Hell, i'd watch that now. It would definitely be good for a few laughs, right, you. Know they were gonna throw a fucking football at Shamou maybe.

Dress up Shamoo and a Pittsburgh Steelers. You've catched it in his mouth pathetically and like everyone would cheer and everyone had and everyone at home would just feel bad. This was the era of Battle of the Network Stars. There was a show where they would have celebrities do like a circus act. I don't remember the name of it, but this was the Star Circus of the Stars.

Thank you. That's I was struggling for a minute there. HP Last week, I think I was at my most depressed because I found myself watching the Bay City Rollers show, which is available online. They had their own variety show where I think I think they played Saturday night like six times. Sean Nana had their own variety show that was on I think it was a Saturday early evening proposition.

I remember watching that as a kid, So yeah, I guess you don't have to be a psychic like Jim to see the merit in the Pittsburgh Steelers at Marine Land over Hometown Girl, Jim offers his opinion. He says, the marine show is gonna win big and the soap opera is gonna get clobbered everywhere except Chicago. See, now, that's where the psychic park comes at. That's where it comes in. Because he's very specific that it's Chicago, where the only place that it doesn't get beaten in the ratings.

Mitch asks Jim if he's in the business, but Jim says, nah, he just gets these hunches once in a while. And as I said, we already know from a couple of episodes ago Jim the Psychic, that Jim is in fact a psychic. Mitch, however, downplays Jim's suggest question as we fade into. The garage down place. He's a dick about it.

Hey, why don't you stick to driving your cab and leave programming television to me? He says that, but Jim then proceeds to drive the wrong way on an on ramp or an exit ramp. So, yes, he should be telling Jim how to drive, because Jim can't drive for anything. We fade into the garage and Alex asks Elaine and Tony why there's white powder all over Louie's cage. Elaine says that she bets it's rat poison because Louise had a well documented struggle with pests in that cage.

By the way, can you imagine how foul and disgusting that cages if he just can't get rid of these pests. He's had cockroaches, it looks like he has mice now, disgusting he's eating in there, and uugh, Well, you know, I. Would think that it would be disgusting because of Louis. But at the same time, Louis does have some self respect and more than that, Jeff is back there, and I don't think Jeff is gonna let considering they're constantly in conflict with roaches that are the size of buicks, that you can't just leave food out, like, you know, I think he would be. I think he would be on Louie's case, like, if you want to keep fighting these things, we can't be feeding them and allowing them to attack us with giving by strength we've given them.

Sure, but I could also see Louis, you know, being like Hein mighty like, oh, look, I'm not gonna change who I am because some eight legged creature wants to have a bite of my salami sandwich. No dice, Jeff, I could see him being a prick about it like that, but it never They agah. But at the same time, I think Jeff just to fucking like not be skeethed out every second when he's at work, would make sure that the cage was clean. Probably, but in any rate, there's another past problem in the cage, and now looks like it's a mouse problem. Jim comes in and asks everybody what's up, and Alex tells him about the powder, and then without war, I thought they were gonna do a cocaine joke.

Without warning, Jim takes a taste of the powder, but then he reports that it's just flour. Louis butts In tells them all to go away. Louis, what he's done is he's put all his flour around his cage so that the mouse or mice will leave little footprints and lead Louie to where they're coming into the garage. And that's exactly what happens. He follows the little footprints and he finds the little hole where they're coming in.

And he discovers the existence of ghosts. Growing up as a kid watching so much Tom and Jerry that I did, I always thought that that's what mice did. They just put this little, neat, little hole in your wall that was probably like an inch tall and a perfect like door shaped hole, and that's how they came into your house. But anyway, Louis follows the trail of mice prints that he finds where we're where they're coming in. Elaine gets upset.

She doesn't want a mouse to suffer. She offers to catch the mouse alive, which she reab bring him back alive, Bring him back alive with Stephen Collins. Uh, this will she says, Well, this will save you money, Louis, because you won't have to spend the money on traps. Louis, being frugal as he is, says that I can't argue with it, So yeah, you do your worst, Nardo figure it out. Just then Mitch comes into the garage and goes, you know, it's funny whenever there's some kerfuffle, people have no qualms about just walking into the garage.

Whenever we see it happen all the time. At least most of the time, someone will come in and say, excuse me, can you tell me where I can find blah blah blah. But more often than not, we do have characters who just come like wandering in like I know what I'm doing here, as if that's acceptable behavior in like this this not only a place of work, but like a dangerous place of work. Potentially Laka could be working on a cab and Jack comes free and they crush their foot under a cab. All kinds of stuff could happen, but.

You might have to have a conversation with Tony Panta. It's just not safe, And you're right. Sometimes it's like a relative of one of the cab he's saying, excuse me, can you tell me where to find Alex riger That's one thing. They're coming in with the appearance of somebody who needs direction. But like Mitch just walks in and he's just like, I'm just gonna look, oh, there's the guy I want to talk to.

Without talking to Louis, without introducing himself. He's just like, I'm gonna walk over to that guy randomly and talk to the people. Who have the right to walk into the cab company and go hey, Alex, you know, because they know him, don't. Mitch goes over to Jim and he reports that Jim's prediction came one hundred percent true, even the bit about Chicago, about that the one place that that show won the ratings in Chicago. He's blown away that Jim's prediction came true.

So Mitch asks Jim for his help. He wants Jim to come to his office give him hunches about the schedule. Mitch is just desperate. His job, he says, is hanging by a thread. But Jim refuses.

He says that he doesn't want to use his talent for gain. Then Mitch plays the Star Trek card and he says to Jim, you could have saved Star Trek if you did this years ago. And that gets through to Jim and he this convinces him to go and help him. So they leave Beta Commercial in. Point of order or point of order, that's not true.

What Jim is doing is not helping anything. He's just picking shows that he knows are going to be popular. It isn't like he's helping the show. He's just saying that's a winner. That's gonna lose.

Because Jim's hunch at that time would have been, Look, Star Trek is gonna lose big in the ratings despite the fact that it's my favorite show. His hunches, like you said, don't boost the ratings for the show. He's just calling it like it is, like this show will win, this show will lose. So he would have said, yeah, Star Trek's gonna lose. I'm sorry, so yeah, I guess that the reasoning is faulty there.

What is the name of the Greek heroine who's standing on the wall saying, don't let in that horse. It's full of Greeks. Cassandra, Cassandra. That's what Jim is here. Like that would be the situation if they had a Star Trek like show on it at the network at this time, he would be forced to like know that his show was going to fail and could do nothing to change it.

It would have been worse for Jim because he would have seen the show failing with and had been able to do nothing to help it at all. Well, I don't know that it'd be worse than watching your city fall because your countryman or a bunch of mars. So we are going to let him a giant horse filled with your enemy. But she could see that happening. I don't mean worse as in the country.

I mean worse is in he can see how the writing and the wall, but he's powerless to effect change. But I'm going to push back on that suggestion that Jim could have done nothing, because here's what he could have done. He would have had the knowledge that Star Trek was doomed to fail. But what would have kept him from saying, Look, it may fail in the short term, but give it three years and this show is going to become big. Trust me.

So he could have at least so he could have lied, is what you're saying. He could have lied exactly. He could have lied for the sake of his favorite show. Let me push back on your pushback. What he could have actually done is said, put it at a time slot that is a guaranteed winner based on the popularity of another show.

That would have made much more sense, where he could have seen, like, oh, you know what, Star Trek is not meant to be a Thursday night show. You put it. I know the Paul Lynn Show with the Cheese is going to be a big rating success. Let's put Star Trek on after that and see if we can't ride that wave a little bit. Sure, because that was really the tale of Star Trek, wasn't it That they couldn't really find an effective time slot for it and never found its audience until too late.

Really Well, that and it became garbage by the third season. Well, yeah, the quality definitely went down, but I think that part of that was the fact that it was not doing well in the ratings to begin with. They started to see less and less reason to put more and more money into it. So maybe maybe Jim could have saved it in his own way. HP.

Did you ever see The Barefoot Executive Stirring a young Kurt Russell was a Disney movie from the early seventies. I'm sure it was on television when I was a kid, but it was probably I was probably too young to really appreciate it, So no, it we had several of those days movies that all. Peter Ward Tennis Shoes, The Strongest Man in the World, The Barefoot Executive, and one more. All of those kind of swirl together in my mind, and it's hard to know where one ends and one begins. I do, however, the one Disney movie that I remember more clearly than any There was a movie with Jan Michael Vincent who.

Played the World's greatest athlete the World. That's the one, The World's Greatest Athlete. I think Tim Conway was in it that one. For some reason, I couldn't get enough of that movie. I loved that movie.

Well. I bring up The Barefoot Executive because Kurt Russell's character Dexter, he's the same character in all of these movies on Campus, gets involved with television ratings and they find a chimp who can pick a winner every time. Not saying that they ripped that off for this episode of Taxi, let's call it an homage inspired. By We'll say. We fade in on b roll of a massive high rise, presumably in Manhattan.

I'm sure that that building is a known building that has a name and a notoriety. I didn't know what it was. It just looked like a giant fucking building that they zoom in on the top of the building. Mitch has a high falutin office in this high rise. We cut inside that office as Mitch is talking to Jim in the office.

Mitch confides to Jim that they need to come up with a cover story for Jim's role in all of this. Mitch eventually lands on the idea that Jim is to pretend to be a shoeshine boy, which Jim agrees to, which is really humiliating. He's a grown man and he's having to pretend to be a shoeshine boy just so that he can have a cover to help this guy out for no reward at all. I mean, he might say Star Trek, he's doing it for altruism, But once you start getting kicked around, I'd be like, peace, you can give me a call, I'll tell you who then are. Yeah, it's kind of where where we're headed with this.

Mitch has one of these big boards in his office that I think we all would would imagine a network executive would have, where it's like it's broken out into grids and you have a timeline of everyday's TV shows. They discuss the shows that they're considering for Tuesday Night. The first one is a sitcom, the second one is a game show, which is he describes it as an updated Truth or Consequences with celebrity contestants featuring Paul Lend For example, Jim loves this show. Mitch says it's more of a summer replacement, but Jim is convinced this is the winner the game show Truth or Consequences with Paul Lynd and he goes on to say, you should have this on Friday at nine pm. But then Mitch says, well, the competition for that time slot is a new James Bond movie on one network, and then something called Brookshields Turns set seen, which maybe feel a little uh yeah that joked in age too well, considering we now know how Brookshields was relentlessly sexualized as a child suffered a lot of damage mentally as a result of this here, it's just a throwaway punchline to a bad TV show.

Yeah, and it's basically all the creeps are going to be either watching one network or another. Either they're like just a misogynist on one network or a pedophile on the other. Pretty much. Jim is certain you put this, you put that game show nine pm on Friday, that's your winner. Mitch reluctantly makes the change, but he makes it clear that he's very depressed that a cab driver is literally doing his work for him.

Imagine saying that out loud to the fucking cab driver. He's right there, work for you. Jim really really gets kicked around a lot in this episode, and I know that part of that is the point of the episode, but it's still hard to see him trying to be altruistic but really just getting the shaft. You know what's funny. If this were any other sort of random character actor in this role, right from that the opening cab moment where they have their first conversation, I'd be like, this is a fucking villain.

Punch this guy in the face. But because it's Martin Short for the longest time, I'm giving him leeway. The thing about the character that Martin Shuret's playing is that he's not doing this as your typical villain who's rubbing his hands together saying I'm gonna be rich, rich, I tell you this is great. There's never a moment where he's not racked with guilt or just flat out depressed that he can't do his job without relying on somebody who has no background in network programming. Right, It's worse than him sort of wringing his hands together and twirling a mustache and being a villain.

It's this crazy narcissism where you can't see anything else, like he's using this. He has found a man with a genuine psychic gift that he can bring to television and fucking become the number one network of all time, and he'd be the guy who fucking discovered him. But instead he's masquerading like syrah No, like he's picking the things, and then he feels guilty because not because he's using the guy, but because it's not coming from him. Fuck this guy. That's a fair point.

But at least if he were taking glee and stealing all of Jim's good ideas, I would feel one way. I would respect, you would respect him if he was evil, just flat out. Evil, if he was like, you know what, I'm just using you. Fuck you, like use the dog door and crawl on out of here, Like at least he'd be up front and at least he'd be aware of his level of evil. This is clueless evil.

It's the Albert Camp move evil. It's like the worst kind. It's a grind. But it would be so much harder to watch if you see somebody blatantly taking advantage of Jim right in front of his face, with and being unrepentant about it. I think that would be difficult to watch.

He's only repentant that he has to do it in the first place. That's fair. So we fade into the garage and Elaine and Tony are lugging in this Rube Goldberg type of mouse catching device. It's got like this long hose, it's got bells, it's got things, all these little do dads and stuff that I can't believe. I just said do dads.

That's ridiculous. It's got all this these things that make noise and it's supposed to catch the mouse. So they lay it all out there. Alex answers the phone in the center of the garage and it's for Jim. It's Mitch from the network.

Mitch reports the switch was a success. The Friday night game showf shuring Paul Lind was a was a big success, and he he he wants Jim to come to the office this afternoon. HP. We did not describe the show where he he said, what is that vat hanging over Paul Lind's head filled with and he said, oh, melted cheese. I you don't want to watch that show.

I don't know you didn't need to tell me it was, but it was an update of any other show. You just say, what is the show involved? Well, at a certain point, Paul Lynn has a vat of melted cheese suspended over his head. Okay, I would. Watch it, but then again, I would watch Captain Freedom's workout or anything from The Running Man.

So I I'd watch I buy that for a dollar. So what does that say about me? I don't know. I'd say you love television, my friend, I. Would, And I think Paul lind with melted cheese peril is a ratings winner, and and it was.

They won the it won. It's good for Jim. Tony asks Jim what the call was about, and Jim announces that the network won the night's ratings for the first time in two years, which is a big deal. Although I don't you know. It used to be when we only had the three or four networks father alone, network ratings were so much more of a big deal than they are now.

And not to say ratings are not important now, but because the television slash cable landscape is so fractured, it's not I don't think you see the same numbers. This was much more of a monoculture. So when a show was popular for that night, the majority of people in the country were watching that, and that's you. You rarely see that nowadays, even like the super Bowl doesn't get the ratings that it used to. But this was a time when the Nielsen ratings were king.

I find it hilarious that a show was pulling in like, oh, only a third of the audience in the in the entire country, we're watching a show that's a loser, like what we're talking about millions of people. Yeah, And the thing is that the network system just shattered to pieces because you could gauge how much each of your ads were worth because you knew how many eyes were on them at that moment thanks to those ratings, So you knew the ad was worth that many millions of dollars because that many more millions of people were watching. Now everything is streaming and YouTube and internets, so who knows if they're getting to watch the ads or not. Who knows to know if a show is a success or not. Well, let me ask you a question, father Milan, were you or did you know anybody who was an actual Nielsen family.

Yes, I do know one that that was me, Yes, I was a Nielsen Family. You really you had one of those boxes, the Nielsen Family box. No, this was when I was an adult. This is when I had first moved to California. So I received out of the blue, just to hey, do you want to participate in this?

And it wasn't a box. It was you would receive a notebook basically a little pamphlet okay that you would have to fill out your television viewing habits and then mail that in and weirdly, they had to pay you for it. So when the book arrived there was always a crisp dollar billing. Is that a down payment on your honesty? I don't know what it is.

I think they have to offer compensation or something like that, but like, so that's them that you're being paid for your time. But I was always like, I was always excited because it was like literally like straight from the mint to your hand courtesy of the Nielsen ratings people. I never saw them or had any interaction. But at a certain point there were special boxes that you would install to your TV that would that that could report back like okay, you were on channel five for twenty minutes, then you changed to Channel seven, and I presume they just they would gather all of this data, crunch it all together, and figure out, Okay, everybody watched this show for fifteen minutes, but then something happened twenty minutes in that made them decide to change the channel.

I assume that's how. It all worked that. I think that might have been how it worked previously, but that wasn't my system, And had they offered that, I would have said no, because I don't want anyone monitoring me minute to minute. That's crazy. Ultimately, whichever method they employed, my point is that this was a time when when this kind of interaction and data was explicitly curried from people.

They were desperate for information on the viewing habits of the American family, so ratings were a big deal. I don't know, you know, you never really hear about it. And I know that places like Netflix they zealously guard their ratings because I don't think they really want people to know what the ratings are for one of their hits, because that would expose too much of their system. I guess yeah. And you know what if studios could hide all of the box office receipts for all of their movies they would because it became such a stupid focal point for the American public to like be tracking what movie's doing well this weekend?

Oh did they drop off fifty percent after the first week? Who cares? Was it a good movie or not? Shut up? After Jim talks about the ratings boom for that Friday night, the other cabs get really excited and they're convinced that this is going to be Jim's ticket out of the garage.

But Jim reports back to them that he's get nothing in return, and in fact, he says he's being treated like a shoeshine boy because that's his cover. Alex gets completely affronted by this whole thing. Is only Alex Ken. He really gets kind of imperious about, demanding that Jim get his self respect back. He says to Jim, this is just ridiculous.

You're getting nothing for the work. Why are you letting your He really gets upset with Jim and asks why he's allowing himself to become a victim. He hates that. Alex gets very very He really yells about this. He's really upset about it.

Jim asks Alex for help, how can he change how can he fix this? Alex tells him the only person you can trust is yourself, and damn it, you need to assert yourself, he says, premuch his exact word, damn it, assert yourself. Alex yells to Jim that he has dignity, has value as a human being, and that guy Mitch needs to understand that too. This pumps up Jim and he says he storms off and he's gonna talk to Mitch. But then he kind of skulks back, picks up the fake shoeshine kit and leaves with it.

So Jim maybe maybe isn't He's kind of hedging his bets a little bit, as it were. So we cut to Mitch's office. Jim storms in and starts yelling at Mitch. Jim says to him he's not gonna help him anymore with his job. Mitch has been taking all the credit for his work.

Mitch completely capitulates and says, you know what, You're right. I did it because I was afraid I was gonna lose my job. He goes on to say to Jim, I did it for this, and he shows him a picture of his three kids and he resolves to Jim he's gonna confess. You know, the guilt is too much for him. He's got to confess.

Just then, the woman Janine from earlier, the network executive with threatened to fire Mitch, walks in and tells Mitch that they're having this big victory party and why don't you come back down. Mitch at this point confesses to Janine that he had nothing to do with the schedule. Jim was the only one who programmed those shows, and Mitch has been taking all the credit for it, and he kind of braces for getting fired. He feels like he's gonna get fired. But Janine is very very sanguine about the whole thing.

She says, look, we're always asking advice from people on programming. She says, ultimately, Mitch, it was your decision, and your decision alone to actually enact those changes, regardless of who suggests those changes, who tells you that'll work or won't work. This convinces Mitch not to fall on his sword, and he goes on to tell Jim that he's unfortunately not welcome at the victory party because Jim is like, all right, let's go, let's celebrate, and he says, all right, let's calm down, Jim. I can't have you go to this victory party. Mitch does say, though, that he's gonna work on getting Jim an office and the salary come Monday morning, so he's not all bad.

Jim again refuses to use his god given talent for personal gain, but he does make a lame joke about all right, but you know what you can pay me for the shoe shines and Mitch says, well, how much ioya? And Jim says, oh, about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Then he fade the commercial. Jim's absolutely right. He should have nothing to do with this guy anymore, simply because the fact that he's if he's going to treat him like a shoeshine boy, if he's going to treat him like he doesn't actually exist amongst the regular staff, he could at least be paying him.

He is a high level executive, it would cost him virtually nothing of his salary to cut Jim a check. Yeah, I actually think it would be a dangerous prospect for Mitch to bring in Jim as a as a junior executive, as it were, because how long do you think it'll be before everybody starts to recognize that Jim is the guy who's gonna sore it out the network schedule, and he's very very quickly going to be the one who's going to be put in charge of all of these scheduling changes. So I think it's actually likely that if Jim did start working for the network, Mitch is going to be out of there in no time because what what value does he ad? At that point, Jim officially is out of the network scheduling business.

And that's fine. You know another I guess you in a funny way, you could look at this as a bit of an aspirational episode, but it's not really. It doesn't really fall into the same traps as a lot of those because frankly, Jim wasn't really that aspirational, Like he just kind of went along for the ride, and once he realized that he was getting shafted, he said, right, fine, I quit. So good for Jim, Well, it was. It wasn't an aspiration episode.

It was just a Jim's version of an aspiration episode, which is he doesn't have. Any We have one plot to resolve in the Bumper. Yes, the Fantastic mouse Hunt. Yes, Christopher walking. Louie is in the garage alone as this Rube Goldberg mouse trap actually starts to work.

All these little bells and things are ringing. You can basically follow the path of the mouse up this hose until at the very end of the hose is a glass jar, and to the show's credit, a real fucking mouse pops into this jar. The thing actually went through the trap. It's actually kind of interesting, like a little. Stage hand had his hand in that trap somehow and then throws a fucking mouse into a jar.

The magic of movies. You think the mouse was mistreated to get it to go through the mouse trap. I'm saying it's a possibility. Perhaps likely, certainly a possibility. So Louis, for his part, he can't believe his luck.

He takes the jar off of the end of the hose, he puts a top onto it, and he he's taunting the mouse with what he's gonna do with it. He says, maybe I'll flush you down the toilet, or maybe I'll just leave it. I'll let you run out of oxygen. And he starts choking to mock this little mouse. But eventually he's looking at this mouse and he notices that it's a baby mouse, which strikes a cord with him.

Let's say he decides to flip a coin to decide the fate of this mouse. Heads, you're the penguin, not two face. Heads. The mouse can live, tails its curtains. So he flips the coin and he looks at it and says, oh, that's it, tails, you're dead, and then he goes, nah, I was only kidding.

It's heads see and he like, he even like shows the coin to the mouse and the jar, and he takes the mouse out the back of the garage, releases him and says go and never come back. And that's the end of the episode. So that's gonna do it for this episode. Now we're going to talk about yellow lights for them alone. What does light me as is our custom.

We're going to grade this from one yellow light to five yellow lights. One is the worst taxi, episode five is the best. Furthering our custom, we're gonna send it to you first. What do you give? Jim joins the network.

It's hard because I think I enjoyed it overall. I didn't like the b plot very much, but I certainly enjoyed Jim and all the Star Trek Talk. I'll give it three stars for Star Trek three. I'll give it three yellow lights for Star Trek. Three nacelles for Star Trek.

You're gonna give this well, I mean, that'd be weird, but that would be weird. So I'm of the same opinion. I gave this one three yellow lights as well. I know you do. But I love a good gym episode.

And actually, what's fun about this is Martin Short. He kind of became known for his very manic tendencies Ed Grimley. Think everybody thinks about Grimley hopping around the SNL said or SETV. But in this one he plays it very, very straight. He has none of the manic tendencies that would mark his work on SETV and beyond.

So I like that about this. He's just a very straightforward no frill's character. That's kind of cool. So a no comedic character almost right. He plays it very straight.

I like that he didn't go nuts. I'm going to give this, you know, three It's slightly above average for me. I don't know that this is one that I revisit all that often, but at the same time, it's a fun one. Jim Jim is never not a good time. So three yellow lights from me, three yellow lights from Father Malone.

That's going to do it for this episode of night, Mister Walters, Father Alone, Where can the folks find you when you're not clocked into the garage. I have a show called Midnight Viewing. It's on twice a week. You can find that done the weirding Way Media Network. As for me, I am in the midst of Trek Fest with Father Alone over on his Midnight Viewing pot.

We're covering the entire Star Trek film franchise from the original episode movies through Next Generation and beyond. Please check that out if you like Star Trek, you just like light science fiction. It's been a delight ye and we're doing standalone episodes soon about non theatrical Star Trek. I also host the Noise Junkies music podcast, and I have a band campsite Hpmusicplace dot bandcamp dot com. So thanks for listening everybody.

Please feel free to subscribe to this podcast, write a review, or rate us. We'd love to hear from you. In fact, you can send email to Hpmusicplace at gmail dot com. For myself and follow alone. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next