Dragnet (radio series)
| Genre | Police Procedural |
|---|---|
| Running time | 30 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language(s) | English |
| Home station | NBC |
| TV adaptations | Dragnet (franchise) |
| Starring |
Jack Webb Barton Yarborough Barney Phillips Harry Bartell Herb Ellis Vic Perrin Ben Alexander Charles McGraw Raymond Burr Tol Avery Various |
| Announcer |
George Fenneman Hal Gibney |
| Created by | Jack Webb |
| Written by |
Jack Webb Various |
| Air dates | 3 June 1949 to 26 July 1957 |
| No. of series | 9 |
| No. of episodes | 314 (List of episodes) |
Dragnet is an American radio series, enacting the cases of a dedicated Los Angeles police detective, Sergeant Joe Friday, and his partners. The show takes its name from the police term "dragnet", meaning a system of coordinated measures for apprehending criminals or suspects.
Dragnet is perhaps the most famous and influential police procedural drama in media history. The series gave audience members a feel for the boredom and drudgery, as well as the danger and heroism, of police work. Dragnet earned praise for improving the public opinion of police officers.
Actor and producer Jack Webb's aims in Dragnet were for realism and unpretentious acting. He achieved both goals, and Dragnet remains a key influence on subsequent police dramas in many media.
The show's cultural impact is such that after five decades, elements of Dragnet are familiar to those who have never seen or heard the program:
Dragnet was created and produced by Jack Webb, who starred as stoic Sergeant Joe Friday. Webb had starred in a few mostly short-lived radio programs, and Dragnet would make him a major media personality in his era.
Dragnet origins were in Webb's small role as a police forensic scientist in the 1948 film He Walked by Night, itself inspired by the violent 1946 crime spree of Erwin Walker, a disturbed World War II veteran and former Glendale California police department employee. The film was depicted in semidocumentary style, and Marty Wynn (a LAPD sergeant from the Robbery Division) was a technical advisor on the film. Inspired by Wynn's accounts of actual cases and criminal investigative procedure, Webb convinced Wynn that day-to-day activities of police officers could be realistically depicted in a broadcast series, without the forced melodrama heard in the numerous private-detective serials then common in radio programming. (Interestingly enough, the film contained two elements that would transfer over to the Dragnet television series: the opening text overlay containing the phrase mentioning that the story is true and "only the names are changed --- to protect the innocent", which was then immediately followed by various shots of Los Angeles with a narrator beginning with the iconic phrase "This is the city. Los Angeles, California.")
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