Here’s What Happened to Jack Webb Before, During and After Creating TV’s First Procedural, ‘Dragnet’

The San Francisco radio station Jack worked for was KGO, where he served as a disc jockey, writer, producer, director, political commentator, performer and a conductor. His first show in 1945 was The Little Man Inside, a tongue-in-cheek look at the inner workings of the mind of an average man. This was followed by 1946’s One Out of Seven, the previously mentioned The Jack Webb Show, Monte Master’s Spotlight Playhouse, Music for the Family, Pat Novak … for Hire and Are These Our Children?, followed in 1947 by Murder and Mr. Malone. The interesting thing is that Pat Novak (co-starring future Perry Mason star Raymond Burr) was supposed to be a drama, but certainly didn’t play that way.

“It’s almost a private eye show, except Pat Novak was a guy who officially rented boats off of a pier in San Francisco, but unofficially he would do any job anybody would pay him to do, like scaring off someone or escorting someone somewhere, which would lead to a murder that he would be blamed for, and that sort of thing,” details Michael. “It was so hard-boiled and extreme that it veered into parody. I mean, he would have lines like, ‘She vibrated like an alarm clock at three in the morning’ or ‘She was badly used like a dictionary in a stupid family.’”

“Jack was a workaholic,” he elaborates. “He put his heart and soul into every project. He had a great love, for example, of jazz from the 1920s; he really enjoyed listening to those records. He had hundreds of them and wanted to something more with that, so he first created a radio series called Pete Kelly’s Blues, which later became a major motion picture starring him and directed by him and produced by him. A great example of him putting his personal likes into his work.”

He eventually left San Francisco and went to Los Angeles, which in turn led to an opportunity to do movies. Following a pair of uncredited roles, he was in He Walked by Night (1948), Appointment with Danger, The Men, Sunset Boulevard and Dark City (all 1950), and Halls of Montezuma and You’re in the Navy Now (both 1951). Points out Michael, “He Walked by Night was based on a true LAPD case about a serial killer, and he played a crime lab technician. There were a couple of real cops acting as technical advisors and Webb at that point wanted to learn everything about everything.”

“Webb went into the editing room and asked the editor questions,” he adds, “and he asked the cameraman a bunch of questions just trying to soak it all up. Inevitably he fell into conversation with the two tech advisors and when they heard his voice, they realized he was Pat Novak — a show in which the cops were demeaned and portrayed to be stupid and not a little corrupt and incapable of solving a crime without outside help. Well, they kind of went off on him about his and he said, ‘Look, nobody believes those shows. Someday somebody ought to do a show about real policemen.’”

In the summer of 1949 regular series on both television and radio was on hiatus, and he needed work. That notion he’d mentioned to the cops came to mind and he realized that the idea had potential. Michael states, “He got in touch with the officers who had been the tech advisers on that movie and said, ‘I think I really want to try and create that show.’ They let him ride with them in the squad car when they went to interrogate suspects, listen to the radio calls and so forth. He began to gather his material that way and that’s literally how Dragnet was born. As it happens, he took it to the right network at the right time. NBC Radio had just lost a whole bunch of talent to CBS — Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy and a number of others — so they had a lot of empty time slots. They took Dragnet on as a summer replacement show and were happy to have it. This was in the summer of 1949 and when Dragnet became a success, Jack Webb became a success.”

Dragnet ran on the radio from 1949 to 1957. As was the wont in those days, it was also turned into a television series that ran from 1952 to 1959, teaming Jack up first with Barton Yarborough and then, following his death, Ben Alexander. The show was taken from the actual files of the LAPD and followed the cops’ various investigations. As intoned at the beginning of each episode, “The story you are about to see is true; the names have been changed to protect the innocent.” Opines Michael, “I would recommend people grab an episode or two of those shows on YouTube and get a feel for what the show was like before the 1960s. I don’t want to say it’s a different show, because a lot of the same tropes are there, but it’s a different show in the sense that police procedure was different then. You didn’t have to read a suspect his rights every five minutes, you didn’t have to follow certain protocol when you were shaking down a suspect or going out on a stakeout. And that’s kind of what made it compelling.”

“The other thing that made the TV version work was that Webb shot nearly everything in tight close-up,” he elaborates. “All you saw were people’s heads when they were doing a back and forth dialogue scene. The ‘big head close-up’ became known in the industry as a Jack Webb. He wanted to get in on people’s faces, because he didn’t want them to get all histrionic with stage acting technique. He wanted to keep it low-key because he instinctively knew television was an intimate medium. As it turned out, he was dead on with that and got a lot of attention for it. For a couple of years, it was the second most popular show on TV, right after I Love Lucy, which also happened to be a filmed show. So between Lucy and Dragnet, the bigwigs became convinced that TV didn’t have to be live. And because Dragnet went into reruns in syndication while it was still on the air as a network series, it proved that the real money in TV was made when you could repeat shows.”

To demonstrate the power of Dragnet, during the show’s third season Jack got the opportunity to direct a movie version of the show, in color and blown up for the big screen. “It was a special case,” explains Michael, “that took 90 minutes to tell and it was very successful for Warner Bros. It was produced independently by Webb’s company and it was Warner’s second highest-grossing film of 1954. It cost about half a million and it made five. For that era, it was very profitable. And that success got him a contract to do other films.”

Those films were Pete Kelly’s Blues (1955), The D.I. (1957), narrator of Red Nightmare (1957), -30- (1959), The Last Time I Saw Archie (1961) and narrator of his final film, Greyhounds of the Sea (1967).

There was, unfortunately, a downside to those big-screen opportunities. Muses Michael, “Because his heart was really centered on becoming a motion picture creator, he began to slack off on the TV shows and you can tell in some of the later episodes. The final 78 episodes were shot over a seven or eight-month period, just one after the other so that he could clear them off. That’s two seasons worth of episodes. He would have been happy if they’d stopped production after a hundred episodes, but there are 276 black and white Dragnet episodes. As it happened, though, because he was juggling other things and because Dragnet was so popular and kept going on and on, and because his other movie roles didn’t catch on the same way, it was obvious that people didn’t want to see him playing other things. Although all of his movies made a profit, each one made less than the one before and eventually it cost him his contract.”

He believes that Jack’s big mistake was to sell ownership of the show to MCA — later NBCUniversal — at the end of 1953. “The network,” says Michael, “wanted to keep it going, the sponsor wanted to keep it going and so it went on and on. Eventually, though, as the ratings began to decline in the last two years they decided to end it. Interestingly, during the last season, Friday got promoted to lieutenant, so he finished the show with that rank. But nobody remembered that, so when the opportunity came to bring Dragnet back in the 1960s, he went back to being a sergeant. It just made more sense.”  Dragnet ended its original run in 1959.

In the first few years after the end of the show, Jack didn’t have a lot of luck. He took over running of the private detective series 77 Sunset Strip and made drastic changes that resulted in plummeting ratings and its sixth season being the last. Jack was accused of being out of touch with the younger television audience. Next, he teamed with actor Jeffrey Hunter (Jesus in King of Kings) for the 1963 Western, Temple Houston. It was an hour-long show that Jack demanded be filmed two to three days per episodes (pretty much unheard of). It lasted 26 weeks.

In 1967, Dragnet was back with Jack as Friday and Harry Morgan (later Colonel Potter on MASH) as his partner, officer Bill Gannon. There was a 100-minute episode filmed as the pilot in 1966, but that was held for airing three years later. The new series ran until 1970, changing the year in its title each season (Dragnet 1967, 1968, etc.). Unfortunately, this version was really out of touch with the youth of the country.

Explains Michael, “He had pretty much given up on film by the early 60s and had tried to continue in television, but was having trouble selling new concepts. Meanwhile, around 1964 or ’65, the made-for-TV movie came into being. Major motion pictures were a big ratings grabber, but there weren’t enough of them. So Universal came up with this idea of creating movies specifically for television, and who better to do one than Jack Webb who knew TV so well and who also had motion picture experience? So they proposed a made-for-TV Dragnet movie, which he made in 1966. It was so good that NBC wanted to bring it back as a half-hour series. He really wrestled with whether or not he wanted to do the series, but then thought maybe he could make a few bucks and become a force in television.”

“It didn’t work with the audience in the same way,” he continues. “It was successful enough that NBC kept it around for four seasons, but it was never the phenomenon that it was when it first appeared. NBC would have kept it another season, because its ratings were respectable and it was not an expensive show to produce, as you can imagine, but by that point, Webb’s company had developed Adam-12, which was a more successful, Top 10 show. And he was developing a property called Emergency!, another popular series.”

Adam-12, starring Kent McCord and Martin Milner as a pair of Los Angeles cops investigating crimes, ran from 1968 to 1975. He created O’Hara, U.S. Treasury, starring David Janssen, which aired in 1971; he cocreated Emergency!, about two L.A. rescuers played by Kevin Tighe and Randy Mantooth, which ran from 1972 to 1977 with six two-hour TV movies produced in the two years following the series’ end; he was executive producer of Richard Boone’s Hec Ramsey, which was part of NBC’s “Mystery Wheel” in the 1970s; and his final series was Project U.F.O., an anthology show taken from the real-life Project Blue Book files, which ran from 1978 to 1979 for a total of 26 episodes.

“He was determined to become the head of a television and producing empire, like the Dick Wolf of his era,” Michael laughs. “Dick Wolf, of course, has acknowledged Dragnet’s influence on Law & Order. Jack’s shows were much more mellow than a lot of others, because he was more interested in showing the procedure; the ‘how’ it was done and not really focusing so much on the personalities. That’s why the characters on these shows were so cut and dry. He felt that if cops and officials and doctors behaved the way that they did in these shows, it would be a better world, because there would be less emotionalism. Fewer cops would go bad, fewer doctors would make mistakes and so on.”

Jack Webb was married four times, first to singer and actress Julie London from 1947 to 1954 (and with whom he had daughters Stacy and Lisa); then Dorothy Towne from 1955 to 1957, actress Jackie Loughery from 1958 to 1964 and, finally, to Opal Wright from 1980 until his death. A three-pack a day smoker, Jack died of a heart attack on December 23, 1982, at the age of 62.

Reflects Michael, “I get the feeling that at the end of his life that he really wanted to get back into the thick of it. It annoyed the hell out of him that shows like Police Story and Hill Street Blues and a few others were showing cops as less than saintly. I think it also bothered him that he was pitching shows to people who had been in diapers when Dragnet was the biggest thing on TV.”

‘Dragnet’ (1987)

If you’re looking for a funny, but still respectful, tribute to Dragnet, check out the feature film of the same name. Released in 1987, it stars Dan Aykroyd as Joe Friday’s namesake nephew; Tom Hanks as his partner Detective Pep Streebek with Harry Morgan as their boss, Captain Bill Gannon.

Related: Listen to the Best of the Classic Radio Show of Dragnet for Free