Dragnet 2023

​There are many hobbies a person can have. They can play pickleball, ski, skateboard, jog, hike, street race in hot rods, or invest in illegal puppy farms.  When they choose fiction, that’s when I go to work. I carry a pen.
 
The blog you are about to read is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.
 
Dum – de – dum – dum – DUM.
 
Nobody is a better world builder than Jack Webb. Oh, you have your Gene Roddenberry’s, oss Whedon's, or your Glen A. Larson’s. But to my way of thinking, no one has built a more unbelievable yet fantastical world than the creator or Dragnet. Nobody looks like his characters, talks like his characters, or even walks like them, yet they are as compelling as any of those found in the fictional Appalachian town of Dogpatch. 
 
Of course, I am talking about the groundbreaking Dragnet 67, 68, 69, and 70. Each season contains some of my favorite memories on television. Now, I realize some purists prefer the Dragnet of the 50s (radio, television, and motion picture). Who can resist an extreme close-up of a fist ready to smash your face? But when we’re talking strictly world-building, nothing even comes close to the latter show.
 
Memorable highlights from each of the seasons. 1967 – the Nazi threatens to blow up a bomb at the neighborhood school (The Big Explosion) or the guru’s open drug house (The LSD Story). 1968 unapologetically gave us the baby in the bathtub (The Big High) and the daring expose on the porn industry (The Big Starlet).
 
Currently, I am reexamining the slightly adjusted tone of the third season. Gone are the titles that emphasized size (The Big Whatever), only to be replaced with episode titles you could really sink your teeth into. Titles that required as much thought as the scripts that inspired them. Public Affairs, Management Services, and of course, my favorite, the aptly titled Community Relations. This last episode brings the procedural to a mountain seminar where everyone sits and talks about their prejudices. Groundbreaking, I tell you. There is so much to unpack in this season. There’s Ginger the marijuana-sniffing dog (Narcotics), and the teenage punks who steel cars, shotguns, and in the words of Officer Bill Gannon describing the poor victim at a bus stop, “Blew his head off, Joe.” 
 
I do not own, Dragnet 1970. As I remember, I was not all impressed when it first aired in, eh, when was that again? But, like my waist size, things change. Now, I can hardly wait. 
 
In a moment, the results from my blog. See ya all next week.
 
Sincerely,
 
The Crimson Crusader