Dragnet

Jack Webb set the standard for law and order police with the creation of Dragnet a show which impacted for better or worse every television police show down to this day. Webb who was a respected character player in the day vaulted to stardom first with the Dragnet radio series and then when it moved to television.

The show started in radio in 1949 and moved to television in 1951 where it ran for 8 seasons. Every story followed a rigid pattern where Jack Webb as Sgt. Joe Friday and Ben Alexander as Detective Frank Smith start the day out working in one aspect of police work. They could be at a specific precinct or at a special command, narcotics, juveniles,homicide, etc. An incident would happen and for the next half hour these two followed the leads and made the arrest.

Webb's interrogation technique became legendary. One can still hear his staccato questioning and when someone got off point, he'd respond with the familiar catchphrase, 'just the facts'.

About the middle point of the show Webb and Alexander would be in their police car and this was where these two got humanized. Alexander and later Harry Morgan would talk about home and family. Webb would listen and smile and occasionally mentioned he had a date coming up. No relationsips though. The phrase 'married to the job' applied to Joe Friday like no other. What a spartan existence he led.

Dragnet was beautifully satirized in an 80s movie that starred Dan Aykroyd as Joe Friday and Tom Hanks as a young and hip partner. It was brought back by Webb for another run from 1968-1971 this time in color.

Webb did the same thing for uniform police with a show he produced Adam-12 which had a respectable run. And the show Emergency. his also, had some solid stories about EMS technicians done in Dragnet style.

Few shows for better or worse had the impact Dragnet has.

Dragnet began on radio in June 1949. The first two programs contained a lot of gratuitous violence. Letters from listeners changed this aspect of the program. On the third program, even the theme music had changed. The lone writer for the radio show was James Moser. Many of Jim's scripts were adapted for television when the TV version started in 1951. Because Barton Yarborough, who played Ben Romero, died while working on the TV show at the Disney studios in Burbank, his rural wisdom was sadly missed.

It should be remembered that Jack Webb was a comedian at heart. Comedy is a hallmark in every Dragnet episode. If you look hard in even the soberest episode about police officers getting killed, you will find smatterings of humor. Jack's first venture in broadcasting was a weekly comedy-variety series originating from KGO in San Francisco and heard on ABC West Coast stations during the spring of 1946.

All of the 1950s shows were in black and white with the exception of the annual Christmas show (The Big Little Jesus), which was always done in color. It was also the only episode which did not bear the statement, "The names have been changed to protect the innocent." There was a Christmas episode used prior to this one which was about a little boy who got a rifle for Christmas. I won't spoil it by telling you the ending, but you can probably figure what happens, three minutes into the show.

Some actors on Dragnet appeared as several different characters. They included Harry Bartell, Ed Phillips, Virginia Gregg, Olan Soule, Allene Roberts, Virginia Christine (Folgers Coffee lady), and many others. Some of the actors were "has beens" like Natalie Masters (who was Candy Matson on a radio series in the late 1940s) and Ben Alexander (Joe Friday's partner--had a big part in the 1930 antiwar flick "All Quiet on the Western Front.") Her husband, Monty Masters was on the production crew. Up and coming stars included Leonard Nimoy (bad guy), Dennis Weaver (worked in the police lab), and Martin Milner (your typical teenager from any Los Angeles high school). Peggy Webber, a woman who was probably born about the same year as Jack Webb, portrayed Joe Friday's mother, with whom he lived.

Those of us who loved the 1950s series find the 1960s series lacking in some ways. While it was a good, wholesome show for the entire family, it wasn't the old series. Of course, Joe Friday's partner, Bill Gannon, would get better stuff in the years to follow, as Col. Sherman T. Potter on M*A*S*H.

One thing a nitpicky guy like me notices is that at the end of Dragnet in the 1950s, Joe Friday was promoted to Lieutenant. When the show came back on the air in the 1960s, he was back to Sergeant.

There were two other programs with the Dragnet name. One was a syndicated program in the late 1980s. It had different characters and a very different feel. The other premiered in 2003: Joe Friday, now Detective Joe Friday, had badge 714 and a partner named Frank Smith, who was Joe's permanent partner after Ben Romero died in 1951 on the original series.

Actually, this show was rude in that the LAPD retired Friday's badge after his death. He had a State Funeral in Los Angeles City Hall. When Jack Webb died, so did Joe Friday.

"Dragnet" is the best police show ever. "Dragnet" was directly responsible for the maturation and realness of police television shows, but it didn't dive into soggy drama stories surrounding the police officers the way soap opera police shows like "Hill Street Blues" did. "Dragnet" instead focused on the actual police stories and the apprehension of the crooks. On radio, the death of actor Barton Yarborough (no relation to me) who played Friday's first partner, Sgt. Ben Romero, was brought into the story, and in a 1953 TV episode Friday shows regret after killing a man for the first time, but that was as far as the drama went. For the most part, "Dragnet" was engaging nuts-and-bolts police work that was directed plausibly by Webb (who was a film-noir veteran by 1950, having appeared in 1948's "He Walked By Night," on which the show was based, and other film-noir classics like "Sunset Boulevard" and "The Men," both filmed in 1949). Many episodes of "Dragnet" have a film noir-like quality to them, often making for nail-bitting, high quality television.

In correction of Mr. Richmond's comment, in the fall of 1952 Herb Ellis took over as Friday's partner after the departure of Barney Phillips. Ellis was the first Frank Smith, and he served as a temporary replacement until someone who matched Yarborough's wholesome humor could be found. And Ben Alexander was chosen. But Alexander's humor was more outwardly silly, whereas Yarborough brought out more unexpected humor. In the first episode, for instance, when Friday and Romero are told about a man carrying a bomb, Romero voluntarily decides to help Friday stop the man because, as he says "Can't go home. My wife wants me to paint the bathroom today." As stiff as Friday's partners often were, they all had their own unique traits: Romero was the unintentionally silly Southerner; Jacobs was the stone cold, ice-eyed quiet one; Herb Ellis's Frank Smith was quiet but easy going; Ben Alexander's Frank Smith was simply goofy.

Jack Webb voluntarily pulled "Dragnet" off the air in 1959, but it returned to the air in new episodes in 1967, going for three and a half years (again in correction of Mr. Richmond's comment). These color episodes were rather different than the original black-and-white ones, but were still of very high quality.

Several sources have stated that Jack Webb really wanted to be a Los Angeles policeman. The height restrictions of that time period kept him from qualifying for his badge. It also has been said that "Dragnet" is the closest to reality of all the police shows ever made.

Dragnet, Mulholland Falls and L.A. Confidential

I've done some reading over the years about Dragnet. Jack Webb was making a movie called "He Walked by Night" in 1948 when the technical advisor, LAPD detective Marty Wynn, expressed exasperation that Hollywood never depicted police work as it actually was. the cops were always hard boiled tough guys, crooked or buffoons. Webb, after thinking about it, asked to accompany Wynn and his partner, Vance Brasher on their nightly rounds and became fascinated by police procedure and the way the real policemen talked. He suggested the radio series that became "Dragnet". The LAPD was enthusiastic because they found the way they were constantly being depicted as distasteful. Webb's police went by the book, spoke "like doctors would to patients". He also eschewed violence except in rare instances, usually showing it after it had taken place and depicting it as the human tragedy it actually was. Webb closely co-operated with the LAPD, using their files for stories and filling his shows with praise for Chief William Parker, who had been hired in 1950 to clean up and give a new image to the department.

The Watts riots were the first chink in this image. Many analysts blamed them on Parker and his department, which was said to enforce racist unofficial rules about which part of town blacks could be in. In recent years, two films have been released which seem to further undercut the image of the LAPD that Webb created, Mulholland Falls, (1996) and L.A. Confidential, (1997). Mulholland Falls introduces us to the "Hat Squad", which is said to be non-fictional. Nick Nolte and his gang report directly to Chief Parker, (who is played briefly but perfectly by Bruce Dern, judging from newsreel clips I saw on his biography). He hired them to rid the city of mobsters and other criminals and to stay above politics. Nobody, but nobody is allowed to operate in L.A., not even the FBI, without going through Parker. The Hat Squad makes their own rules to do their job, including throwing a would-be mobster, (played by CSI"s William Peterson), off a cliff on Mulholland Drive they have given the title name.

In L.A. Confidential, the Hat Squad and Chief Parker do not make an appearance, although I wonder if James Cromwell's Capt. Smith is somehow supposed to represent him. We are introduced here to Jack Vincennes, who is a technical advisor on a show obviously intended to represent Dragnet, the star of which is a total phony. Russell Crowe's Bud White would look good in a hat and Guy Pearce's Ed Exley seems to have watched too many episodes of Dragnet.

These two films suggest that Dragnet was a phony, too, a public relations gimmick to make the seedy LAPD look good. Recent events have also not helped the image of the department, suggesting that planting evidence to help along prosecution and prejudice against African Americans is a long-standing condition. Maybe those melodramas of the 40's had it right about the LAPD.

But books about Jack Webb tell about him doing such extensive research into not only the methods of the department but also the details of a cop's life. I suspect that even Chief Parker could not have protected the Hat Squad once they attacked and brutally beat up an FBI agent, as Nick Nolte does. And are we to believe that Mickey Cohen was brought to justice so the LAPD could take over his rackets? Was there ever an Alamo-like shoot out between good cops and bad cops? Was it that bad? Or is Hollywood simply reclaiming the territory won by Jack Webb in Dragnet?

There are people who know. But I am not one of them.