Jack Webb, who died thirty years ago this weekend, arrived at
the right time. “After the war, people were much more realistic,”
notes Peggy Webber, star of more than 100 Dragnet
episodes. “They wanted things to be as honest as possible. And he
filled the bill.”
Dragnet, as the just-the-facts catchphrase it inspired
indicates, depicted police work without the frills. Whereas other
detective stories attracted listeners through the promise of a
weekly shootout, Dragnet snagged them by keeping the
weapons holstered. The iconic music, gimmicky teasers promising to
reveal case results, and insistence that the show dramatized
real-life events joined with the deadpan deliveries to provide the
program an audience and authenticity.
My favorite radio episode involved a disturbed old man who for
thrills made emergency phone calls for fake car accidents and the
like. Typical broadcasts included bunco swindles of Korean War
widows, juvenile delinquent rumbles, and small-time robberies of
mom-and-pop outlets. Occasionally, the radio run tackled heroin,
pornography, and other (im?)mature themes. The hustlers argued
their innocence. They never, unlike their counterparts in the
’60s-era television version, argued the innocence of hustling.
Crime hadn’t changed. Criminals had.
This became startlingly evident on the January 12, 1967 premiere
episode of Dragnet 1967, which depicts a blue-faced
teenager tripping on acid. Blue Boy memorably makes numerous
non sequitur observations: “Brown, blue, yellow, green,
green, orange, red. Red! Red! Red! I can hear them! I can hear them
all!” Fifties, meet the sixties.
We remember this post-Miranda incarnation of
Dragnet, despite it not achieving the success of the
fifties television series or the radio program that started in
1949, in part because of its new-morality-meets-old quality. Joe
Friday, with his close-cropped square-cut and
man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit look in a tie-dyed age, might be best
seen as a time traveler from the previous decade scoffing at the
hubris of Timothy Leary-types, hateful Black Panthers, George
Lincoln Rockwell-wannabes, and other enemies of law and order
made-to-order for a Technicolor age.
Jack Webb, who married four beautiful women and fanatically wore
down jazz records, wasn’t the spartan bachelor Joe Friday. But the
actor resembled the character enough to notice. The World War II
veteran narrated the federal government’s Cold War propaganda film,
Red Nightmare. When Webb didn’t hawk Chesterfields to his
listeners he chain smoked them long after radio’s golden age had
passed. Loved ones hectored him to clean up his caveman diet. He
countered: “What would the public think of Sergeant Friday if they
thought he ate granola and drank milk?”
You can learn a lot about the actor and the character by
watching, or listening to, Dragnet. Jack Webb could be
preachy. He could be callous in his penchant for cruelly ironic
one-liners when a villain fell as a victim. He could be cold. But
he couldn’t overact. Jack Webb was the anti-William Shatner.
The man converged most with the character in his loyalty.
Unlike, say, Gunsmoke, which ditched the gravel-voiced
William Conrad for the granite-chinned James Arness,
Dragnet retained its actors when it transitioned from
radio to television. Gerald Nachman in Raised
on Radio observed more than insulted when he dubbed the
pixilated Dragnet “animated radio.” Radio’s same character
actors appeared in different roles over and over again on
television. Nachman points out, “The neorealistic show was such a
total radio creature that it gained nothing from TV—you could shut
your eyes and absorb it totally through your ears.”
Whereas listeners tuned into Dragnet in 1949 because it
fit in with the times, viewers tuned into the show in 1967 because
it stood apart from them.
“Don’t think you have a corner on all the virtue, vision in the
country,” Joe Friday lectured the would-be creators of a hippie
utopia. “Or that everybody else is fat and selfish and you’re the
first generation to come along that’s felt dissatisfied. They all
have, you know, about different things. Most of them didn’t have
the same opportunity and freedoms that you do. Let’s talk poverty.
Most places in the world that’s not a problem. That’s a way of
life. And rights? They’re liable to give you a blank stare because
they may not know what you’re talking about. The fact is more
people are living better right here than anywhere else ever before
in history. So don’t expect us to roll over and play dead when you
say you’re dissatisfied.”
Jack Webb, like another pop culture giant of the sixties, just
wasn’t made for these times. But the silent majority watching NBC
on Thursday nights was pleased he was there.
