Since March 2007, I've been podcasting one radio episode of Dragnet per week to recreate the experience of Dragnet's first listeners, as well as providing commentary and sharing listener feedback before and after the show. The show has listeners across America and around the World.
Also, I'll be posting a Monthly public domain Dragnet TV episode.
If you'd like to join this journey through Dragnet, click here to add the show to Itunes or here if you'd like to subscribe through Zune. For all other services, click .
Jack Webb always had an impeccable sense of timing. The real world of police can often be one full of heartbreak and sorrow. In the midst of this, a lighter episode can mean an uplift to the audience and provide a change of pace. The Big Amateur came right after “The Big Search” the week before and right before a powerful episode we’ll profile soon, called “The Starlet.”
As has happened in several episodes, a phony police officer is on the loose. However, unlike in the Badge Racket, he’s not out for money. Unlike in the 1949 radio episode, “The Red Light Bandit,” or the 1959 TV episode, “The Big Counterfeit” he doesn’t appear to be doing a shakedown. In fact, other than the fact that he’s not really a policeman, he appears to be a model officer. The payoff is surprising, and worthwhile.
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Dragnet told the story of a lot of bunco cons. For pure audacity, this one may have taken the cake, as it involves the cons impersonating policemen and taking their victims, out of town businessmen, to the police station and shaking them down for bail money. To solve the case, Bill Gannon goes undercover.
This is a fantastic episode with a great payoff at the end.
While waiting for a drug buy, Joe Friday and Frank Smith overhear a confession to murder, but when they get up the man is gone. Who confessed and how are they going to prove it.
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Joe Friday and Bill Gannon are investigating a series of movie memorabilia thefts. A pretty routine show until they catch up with the perpetrator and then a human drama is played out that is incredibly surprising, particularly if people take a stereotypical view of Dragnet.
One of Dragnet’s greatest attributes is its ability to find a place for real human emotions. It’s a realistic show, and in the real world people don’t act like they do on a typical mystery show. On Dragnet, it’s not only the police that act like real life, it’s the people. This can be seen going back to the days of the Dragnet radio show and through each television incarnation. A person would come in view and from what they say we’d learn their hurts and their fears, and their anxiety. And because they come off as real human beings, they connect with us as people.
Dragnet did a great job portraying the hardened criminal, the arrogant murderer, and the stone cold evil sociopath. But it also brought us up close and personal to the pain of an old man whose old friend was just murdered, a childless woman who is deeply hurt when rumors spread that she’s behind a series of babies thefts, or to a family whose son had relapsed back onto drugs, or the lost soul driven to crime by deep-seated personal pain. This episode is a great example of that tradition, and one of the highlights of Season 3.
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Christmas in June? It’d be tempting to artificially work things so that the Christmas episode ends up in the list around Christmas, but by Christmastime I’ll be done, so there’s no reason for facade.
This episode belongs where it is. It is quite an episode: a remarkable almost word for word reshooting of the 1953 version of the Story. The show was one of two entries in the 1960s show that had its basis in a 1950s episode.
The story is beautiful and surprising, a Christmas treasure that’s still memorable and heart-warming after all these years. It is a testament to the writing of Richard Breen. In his life, Breen won an Academy Award for Best Writing, Story, and Screenplay for the 1954 minor Classic, Titanic.
But as the years has faded, so has Breen from the public consciousness. However, this one episode of Dragnet he wrote in 1953 during the first year of the Eisenhower Administration could be retold with ease in the anger and rage of the late 1960s, when the whole world had changed. Two decades later, a version of the story would be used in an episode of Macgyver. And if you were to tell the same story today, you could use almost the same script that Breen did.
What makes the story so timeless? I think it’s that element of the unexpected. We begin the episode with a sense of dismay at the idea of someone robbing a church on Christmas Eve, particuarly of a religious statue, and we’er led to suspect a devout worshiper with a past of committing a crime. Yet, in the end, we found out things weren’t quite as they appeared.
What looks like a theft is not always a theft, and as Friday suggests, what looks like a poor person isn’t always a poor person. Through the tumult of the years, and the painful side of life that Dragnet portrays, this episode stands out for its hope. It was in the same vein as the famous Apollo 8 message that would come the next Christmas in providing hope and re-assurance to a troubled and turbulent world. More than 57 years after Breen produced the first version of this story, it still stands as a beacon that continues to connect with new generations.
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