For the first several episodes of Taxi Driver, I was completely hooked. A fun take on the revenge story that was both playfully irreverent and deeply, brutally serious. The theme and tone of the episodes managed to balance this perfectly. Our various characters reveled in their ruthless undertaking with, initially, little thought for the broader moral complexities.

Naturally, as the series progressed, these moral complexities worked their way to the surface. Mature and nuanced debates about justice versus revenge, vigilantism versus an established justice system, etc. etc. became more prevalent without ever damaging the pacing or feel of the story.

Mostly, this is a drama that doesn't really need a review. You get what's on the tin. It's done exceptionally well. Enough is left unresolved to leave room for personal consideration. The action sequences were wonderful. The characters were wonderfully developed and the whole cast had lovely chemistry. I also enjoyed the pronounced lack of romance.

HOWEVER.

About halfway through, a storyline was begun that damn near ruined the whole thing. I'm not one to jump up and down about how women should or should not be portrayed. I'm of the mind that women, like all human beings, exist in limitless variety and so there really is no "wrong" portrayal, strictly speaking. But this went far enough to offend my intelligence. A case was introduced that had a personal connection to the woman on the team. Many cases arose throughout the series that had personal connections to the various main characters. And all of them struggled to deal with their own emotional baggage as they worked on the case. However when hers came about, she didn't struggle. She ran away to her house where she locked herself in her bedroom and hid under her bed (literally) for days. She was an adult whose irrationally and unnaturally childish behavior was being depicted as normal and unsurprising. No one could reach her. They ended up having to cope with her absence as they tried to handle the case without her essential skills. It came across like she, being a woman, was literally incapable of dealing with the emotional weight of it. This particular case, too, dragged on MUCH longer than the previous ones had, which made this situation feel like it would never end. I almost dropped the drama because of it. An absurd decision that someone ought to be punished for.

And it wasn't like the men were depicted as having an easy time with their personal issues. One had a panic disorder that actually landed him in the hospital. They all struggled, but the men were, apparently, able to at least maintain lucidity and uprightness (and adulthood?). Whereas the woman, being female, actually fully shut down under the pressure of ~~trauma~~ and reverted back to a seven-year-old child. It was like this was the only way the writers could think to portray a woman having a hard time with something. Like they thought it was somehow unrealistic for her to at least be able to attempt to struggle through it. And that it was far more realistic for the woman to respond to difficulty exactly the same way a child would. Because a woman and child are more or less the same thing, right?

If you fast forward through all that garbage, this series is really wonderful. Though I'm hesitant to watch Season 2 on the chance there might be more of that.