Dragnet

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.

I'm most familiar with the Harry Morgan period but all versions I've seen of the TV and radio originals are really good. Post-sixties angst is absent from the stories and characterizations, as in Perry Mason and perhaps a few others. Actually, "Ozzie and Harriet" from a different angle gives the same picture of a time with a bit less self-doubt.

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.

Hipsters have a lot of fun turning Dragnet's Joe Friday into a kind of 50's style robocop. Too bad that the robotic side has come to define this signature series. Because in reality, the show was much more than what it's become-- the butt of comics from Dan Ackroyd to Jay Leno. Dragnet was much more because the show actually defined police work for millions of viewers during those early TV years. Friday was in audience eyes (mine too) the ultimate police professional. And if he seemed a tad stiff without any discernible personal life, that was OK since the law should be applied in a formal and impersonal manner. And if that also coincided with the civil liberties trashing Joe Mc Carthy, that's OK too because everybody liked Ike and Ike was president, not Joe Mc Carthy. In short, Dragnet was more than a TV event-- it was a cultural reflection with a long-lasting impact on how Americans pictured law enforcement.

In fact, it's not a stretch to claim that Dragnet redefined the popular police image from what it had been. Consider, for example, how cops were portrayed in the 1930's. They were either three fumbling steps behind Bogart and Cagney, or played buffoonish comic relief for the likes of Boston Blackie and Charlie Chan. Still, depression era audiences didn't mind, since cops were generally viewed as adversaries who enforced bank foreclosures or busted up union rallies. A decade later, police largely disappeared from the screen as America went to war, but even after the boys came home, cops only existed around the edges. However, there was a development at 20th Century Fox that foreshadowed the rise of a Dragnet. And that was the use of a documentary style of film-making in movies such as Boomerang, and Naked City, to name two. Such films emphasized hum-drum real-life activities across a spectrum that often included police work. And audiences responded, since they were not used to seeing some of their own reality coming from Hollywood's well-honed Dream Factory.

Jack Webb's genius lay in seeing how this documentary approach could be applied to radio and then TV. Audiences really had little idea of how modern police departments worked, and no doubt many still struggled with the comic versions of the 30's. However, Webb made a fateful decision at that point-- he got the collaboration of the Los Angeles Police Department to give the show a stamp of authenticity. On one hand, the endorsement said to viewers-- this show is special since these are real cases and this is the way we really operate. On the other hand, it put strict limits on Sgt. Friday and how cops could be portrayed. Because now he was no longer just a working cop, he was a stand-in for the whole LAPD, and eventually for departments from Miami to Seattle. With that kind of responsibility, what show could afford to take chances. Thus was born Friday the law-and-order robot, while actor-Webb locked into a role he couldn't change even if he wanted to.

But you've got to hand it to the guy. In the spirit of real world appearance, he did his darndest to de-glamorize police work. There were no busty babes, no high-speed chases, no heroic shoot-outs, nor even bloody fist-fights. Instead, Friday plodded around town in the same seedy sport coat interviewing John or Joan Q. Public, making an occasional low-key arrest. And if the public seemed at times not too bright or not very cooperative or sometimes even criminal, he kept his cool. Sure, he could get riled and spit out a snarl, plus that annoying habit of topping comments he didn't like. But he was never flashy nor brutal nor egotistical. Okay, so maybe, despite all the official hype, Friday was still a pretty long way from a real cop. Nonetheless, he and his cast of ordinary-looking people did what the series set out to do. They were close enough to the real thing to make the audience believe.

The first few years were, I think, the best. After that, the show became too concerned with lightening the mood, and we got a lot of folksy humor from partner Frank Smith to make up for Friday's lack of a personal life. But those first few years brought forth some of the most memorable mini-dramas of the time-- a teenager accidentally shoots a friend, a cruel old man murders his wife, an adulterous wife abandons her wedlock baby. Many of the cases even concerned minor crimes far from the usual. And oddly, it was director Webb's much derided Spartan style that turned many of these cases into the powerful human-interest stories they were. The tight close-ups, the terse, understated dialogue, the spare sets, all worked to concentrate attention on the human side of the story. At such points, Friday often faded into the background, becoming, as it were, little more than a mute bystander-- an ironical outcome for a series that specialized in police procedure.

Still, the series was wedded to its time. Soon, the Eisenhower years turned into Vietnam, Jim Crow turned into Civil Rights marches, and social conformity morphed into a lively counter-culture. And many urban issues the show had avoided (police brutality) or underplayed (corruption) suddenly burst into headline stories. More importantly, cops were no longer viewed as impartial defenders of the law, but as agents of a hypocritical, repressive "establishment". The times had changed, yet Friday's 50's brand of unquestioning assumptions about authority hadn't. Thus, the 60's revival of Dragnet was doomed from the start. But that shouldn't take away from the show's genuine accomplishment of de-glamorizing real police work. Of course, the hipsters are probably right-- Friday did look a lot like a 50's robocop. But, they're also wrong. Because, at its best during those early years, the series was verifiably human, or as some might hold, all-too-human. Too bad the hipsters can't work that into their act.

I've been watching some older episodes recently, courtesy of a couple of bargain four-episodes DVD I got in a Brighton 99p shop, and my attitude towards the series has changed somewhat from when I first saw Dragnet some decades ago. I now realise that the very tight, plodding format with the story told mostly through voice-over - much satirised, most memorably in Police Squad! and in a classic parody in an early Mad magazine - can somewhat blind the viewer to some of the show's more subtle strengths. The show does seem to make an effort to show the often tedious and legwork-heavy aspects of police work, and avoids violence and gratuitous gunplay as much as possible. But there's often a very sympathetic tone in Dragnet episodes towards the culprit, understanding that crime is often tragedy - such as in an episode called Big Porn, where in the final minutes a pornographer is revealed as a sad, tired old man, reliving his old days as a movie director. I particularly like an episode called Big Shoplift where the criminal turns out to be a lonely woman suffering from kleptomania, for whom even Joe Friday recognises that jail is not the right place. This compassion was a step forward from the efficient but rather cold film that inspired Dragnet, He Walked by Night, in which Webb had a bit part.

When I first saw Dragnet, I think in particular I underestimated the performance of Jack Webb, who seems to approach his suspects with a very human demeanour which is entirely realistic and such an antidote to the overplayed performances of many later TV cops. Webb produced and often wrote and directed the shows, and he displays a sure, experienced touch. Incidentally, the series didn't always take itself that seriously: look out for a wildly campy episode which alters the opening titles to read "Badge 417".