In praise of drabness.(Dragnet)

IF you're 50 or older, you won't need to be told the source of these half-recalled phrases: "The story you are about to see is true." "This is the city." "I carry a badge." "My name's Friday." If you're much younger than that, though, I doubt that you'll remember Dragnet with any clarity. In the early days of network television, Dragnet was the most successful of all cops-and-robbers TV shows, as well as the most influential. It's still influential--every episode of Law and Order bears its indelible stamp--but TV has since moved in flashier directions, and I doubt that the narrative conventions brought into being by Jack Webb, the producer, director, and star of Dragnet, will remain conventional for much longer.

For baby-boom TV viewers, Dragnet 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 Sgt. Joe Friday, Webb's 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 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.

The real Dragnet 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 "official" version, so far as I know, in the works. Fortunately, a few dozen episodes were inadvertently allowed to go out of copyright, and it's easy to track down copies of them. Madacy Home Video, for instance, offers a budget-priced Dragnet box set containing 25 decent-looking public-domain episodes, and you can acquire a dozen more from Shokus Video. At $19.98, the Madacy box is ... well, a steal.

Like the later color version, the Dragnet of the Fifties was a no-nonsense half-hour police procedural that sought to show how ordinary cops catch ordinary crooks. The scripts, many of which were written by James E. Moser, combined straightforwardly linear plotting ("It was Wednesday, October 6. It was sultry in Los Angeles. We were working the day watch out of homicide.") 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.

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, and almost nobody was happy. The atmosphere was that of film noir minus the kinks--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 was still rough stuff, more uncompromising than anything that had hitherto been seen on TV. In 1954 Time called the series "a 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 seem as sorrowfully genuine as old pistols in a hockshop window."

The show's plainness was underlined by the fact that most of the scripts had originally been written by Moser for the radio version of Dragnet, which was launched in 1949. As Michael Hayde explains in My Name's Friday, his excellent biography of Webb, the old scripts were filmed virtually without change when Dragnet moved to TV in 1951. Webb believed that there was no need to adapt them more ...