On this day in 1949, Actor-director Jack Webb, creator of the hit radio and TV series Dragnet, gets his start in realistic crime drama with the radio show Pat Novak for Hire, which makes its national network debut on ABC. Jack Webb played Novak, whose deadpan, hard-boiled delivery foreshadowed Dragnet’s Joe Friday. The show ran for only about four months.Webb was raised by his mother in Southern California. After high school graduation, he spent four years in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, working a desk job. He started his radio career in San Francisco and soon landed his role in Pat Novak for Hire. In 1949, he was chosen to play the role of Lt. Lee Jones in He Walked by Night, and it was there that he met Marty Wynn, a sergeant for the Los Angeles Police Department who was working as a technical adviser for the program.
Webb’s conversations with Wynn-and an invitation to review real LAPD case files-spurred Webb to develop Dragnet as a radio show. CBS rejected the show, but NBC agreed to give Webb’s program a trial run in 1949, even though his show lacked a sponsor.
Eighteen weeks later, cigarette company Chesterfield agreed to sponsor the show, a partnership that lasted for seven years. The television debut of Dragnet, four years after the radio program began, marked the beginning of realistic TV police dramas. Webb starred as Sgt. Joe Friday and narrated the shows in a documentary style, turning “Just the facts, ma’am” into a national catchphrase. Episodes were based on real cases from the Los Angeles Police Department, and each half-hour segment concluded with the capture of the perpetrator, followed by a short synopsis of what happened at the suspect’s trial.
Dragnet was resurrected in 1967 under the name Dragnet 1967 and ran for another three years, focusing this time on helping citizens in distress and community service rather than high-intensity crime. In 1987, Dragnet was revived again, this time as a spoof feature film starring Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks. The TV show reappeared two years later as a syndicated series, airing in the 1989-90 season in New York and Los Angeles only, then nationally syndicated the following season. Webb, whose other television series included Emergency! and Adam 12, died of a heart attack in 1982 and was buried with full LAPD honors. The LAPD retired the badge he wore on Dragnet, sergeant’s badge No. 714, and erected a memorial to him on the LAPD Academy grounds.
This entry was posted on Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 5:15 am and is filed under BREAKING NEWS, NEWS OF THE DAY. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Recent Comments