{"id":38546,"date":"2017-05-16T04:00:40","date_gmt":"2017-05-16T08:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=38546"},"modified":"2017-05-15T22:34:49","modified_gmt":"2017-05-16T02:34:49","slug":"terry-teachout-remembers-dragnet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/05\/16\/terry-teachout-remembers-dragnet\/","title":{"rendered":"Terry Teachout remembers Dragnet<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I vaguely remember watching Dragnet<\/em> on TV, but the version I watched is apparently just a pale imitation<\/a> of the original series:<\/p>\n

\"\"If you\u2019re fifty or older, you won\u2019t need to be told the source of these half-recalled phrases: \u201cThe story you are about to see is true.\u201d \u201cThis is the city.\u201d \u201cI carry a badge.\u201d \u201cMy name\u2019s Friday.\u201d If you\u2019re much younger than that, though, I doubt that you\u2019ll remember Dragnet<\/em> with any clarity. In the early days of network television, Dragnet<\/em> was the most successful of all cops-and-robbers TV shows, as well as the most influential. It\u2019s still influential \u2014 every episode of Law and Order<\/em> bears its indelible stamp \u2014 but TV has since moved in flashier directions, and I doubt that the narrative conventions brought into being by Jack Webb, the director, producer, and star of Dragnet<\/em>, will remain conventional for much longer.<\/p>\n

For baby-boom TV viewers, Dragnet<\/em> is both iconic and ironic. The version of the show that ran on NBC from 1967 to 1970, in which Webb was partnered by Harry Morgan, was an exercise in unintended self-parody, full of hippy-dippy druggies and the earnest cops who locked them up and threw away the key. A few of the episodes remain effective in their quaint way, but most are embarrassingly stiff. Part of the problem was that Sergeant Joe Friday, Webb\u2019s character, was the squarest of squares, and it was already chic to smirk at such straight-arrow types by the time I reached adolescence. My father watched Dragnet<\/em> religiously, though, so I did, too, little knowing that what I was seeing each week was a recycled, watered-down simulacrum of the real thing.<\/p>\n

The real Dragnet<\/em> was the black-and-white version that aired from 1951 to 1959. That series, in which Webb was partnered by Ben Alexander, was pulled out of syndication long ago and has never been legitimately reissued on DVD, nor is any \u201cofficial\u201d version, so far as I know, currently in the works. Fortunately, a few dozen episodes were inadvertently allowed to go out of copyright, and it\u2019s easy to track down copies of them. […]<\/p>\n

Like the later color version, the Dragnet<\/em> of the Fifties was a no-nonsense half-hour police-procedural drama that sought to show how ordinary cops catch ordinary crooks. The scripts, most of which were written by James E. Moser, combined straightforwardly linear plotting (\u201cIt was Wednesday, October 6. It was sultry in Los Angeles. We were working the day watch out of homicide\u201d) with clipped dialogue spoken in a near-monotone, all accompanied by the taut, dissonant music of Walter Schumann. Then and later, most of the shots were screen-filling talking-head closeups, a plain-Jane style of cinematography that to this day is identified with Jack Webb.<\/p>\n

The difference was that in the Fifties, Joe Friday and Frank Smith, his chubby, mildly eccentric partner, stalked their prey in a monochromatically drab Los Angeles that seemed to consist only of shabby storefronts and bleak-looking rooms in dollar-a-night hotels. Nobody was pretty in Dragnet<\/em>, and almost nobody was happy. The atmosphere was that of film noir minus the kinks \u2014 the same stark visual grammar, only cleansed of the sour tang of corruption in high places. But even without the Chandleresque pessimism that gave film noir its seedy savor, Dragnet<\/em> was still rough stuff, more uncompromising than anything that had hitherto been seen on TV. In 1954 Time<\/em> called the series \u201ca sort of peephole into a grim new world. The bums, priests, con men, whining housewives, burglars, waitresses, children and bewildered ordinary citizens who people Dragnet<\/em> seem as sorrowfully genuine as old pistols in a hockshop window.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I vaguely remember watching Dragnet on TV, but the version I watched is apparently just a pale imitation of the original series: If you\u2019re fifty or older, you won\u2019t need to be told the source of these half-recalled phrases: \u201cThe story you are about to see is true.\u201d \u201cThis is the city.\u201d \u201cI carry a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,28,13],"tags":[1063,311,750,98,101],"class_list":["post-38546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-media","category-usa","tag-1950s","tag-1960s","tag-losangeles","tag-police","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-a1I","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38546"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38549,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38546\/revisions\/38549"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}