RealmMan

Another entry for the "Unnecessary Remake" file. It's bad enough to remake what some would consider a classic (a dated classic, but classic nonetheless), but to re-remake it? Oy. Instead of this, I think it would have been interesting to see a follow-up to the 1976 original. Get Jodie Foster back as Annabelle Andrews, now a single mom trying -- and failing -- to avoid the same pitfalls with her daughter that she had with her mother. She's also trying to avoid another Friday like she had before, but the plot being what it is... Add the obligitory "Oh, god, not again" scene, and we're good to go. If they had only done it again one time, I'd be fine. But the third-time-around just feels like studio execs trying to avoid having to think up new material. But what's done is done. Whatever.

This is another well-written, tightly-paced crime drama from "Law & Order's" Dick Wolf... but it ain't "Dragnet." It's really a fourth version of "Law & Order" set in LA with Jack Webb's characters plopped into it. This show is all-but unrelated to the classic series. Don't get me wrong, Ed O'Neill does a good job as a hard-nosed cop -- just as he did on "Big Apple" -- but much of what made "Dragnet," "Dragnet" is lost here. One of the founding principles of Jack Webb's series was that the episodes were dramatizations of actual LAPD cases. Here, "inspired by actual events." It looks to be a good cop show, but it's "Dragnet" in name only.

"Dragnet" (1989) was a pretty straight-forward re-do of the classic Jack Webb series, just swapping out Joe Friday and Frank Smith (or Bill Gannon, depending on your era) for Daniels and Malina. The format was the same: a half-hour police procedural drawn from real LAPD cases, complete with the requisite "The story you are about to see is true; the names have been changed to protect the innocent." My only real problems were the omission of the classic "Danger Ahead" theme (you know: "da da-dum da"), and the obnoxious music-video-style opening titles. Not that anyone else noticed, as the show was gone in a year, a victim of really real police stories on "COPS". Note: Despite the time-frame, this show was unrelated to the 1987 Dan Ackroyd film.