LizzieMaine
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No doubt this will be a mark against my pinko cred, but I really enjoy "Dragnet." Not the modern reboots or ironic satires, but the real Jack Webb deal. Webb was a unique figure in 1940s-70s media, a pretty hep character who created for himself the squarest image that could possibly be conceived, and he made it absolutely believable, even the later episodes where he seemed to be positioning himself against the "camp" sensibility while, simultaneously, exploiting that sensibility for all it was worth. "Now you listen here, flower-boy, and you listen good..."
Webb's finest work is the original radio "Dragnet." It's hard to explain how utterly revolutionary this show was without the full context of overheated, formulaic late-forties radio crime drama to stack it up against. In the way the program was written, and especially in the way it was acted, the radio "Dragnet" flew in the face of every accepted convention of radio drama, and it paved the way for all the other "adult dramas" that popped up during the early 1950s as radio gasped its last breaths. That the TV "Dragnet" managed to preserve the essence of what made the radio show so good is testimony to Webb's integrity as a producer and a performer. He's one of the few people to come out of 1940s-50s broadcast entertainment who never, ever sold out.
Webb's finest work is the original radio "Dragnet." It's hard to explain how utterly revolutionary this show was without the full context of overheated, formulaic late-forties radio crime drama to stack it up against. In the way the program was written, and especially in the way it was acted, the radio "Dragnet" flew in the face of every accepted convention of radio drama, and it paved the way for all the other "adult dramas" that popped up during the early 1950s as radio gasped its last breaths. That the TV "Dragnet" managed to preserve the essence of what made the radio show so good is testimony to Webb's integrity as a producer and a performer. He's one of the few people to come out of 1940s-50s broadcast entertainment who never, ever sold out.
