Word: dragnet
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What is missing from Television is a critical point of view or guiding theme -- or, indeed, anything that would lift the series above a mere catalog of Great Moments from TV's Past. The uninspired narration does little more than scoot us from one clip to the next ("Dragnet was the first hit police show. It has been followed by a succession of cop shows."), with little insight into how the medium got from there to here. The series focuses, wisely, on programming rather than the business of TV; still, somewhere amid the clips of Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleason...
...grossing films released in 1987. Audiences seemed to take more pleasure in the spectacle of people and things that went blam! in the night: Fatal Attraction, The Untouchables, Lethal Weapon, Predator. Oh, there were cop comedies (Beverly Hills Cop II, the No. 1 hit, and Stakeout and Dragnet) and a devil comedy (The Witches of Eastwick) and an oddly amoral Michael J. Fox comedy (The Secret of My Success -- sort of Wall Street for the Smurf set). But all these films traded in physical or emotional degradation; they left an acrid aftertaste. One began to wonder how long Hollywood could...
...order from his superiors. Yet the bemedaled Marine refused to fall on his sword and take full blame for the scandal that has wounded his Commander in Chief. Although he confessed candidly -- and defiantly -- to blatant lies and deceptions, North also threw what even he called "Ollie North's dragnet" over high officials of the Administration he had served. North's net fell only a carefully calculated distance short of the Oval Office...
Hollywood is happy again. A lot of summer films are making big money; each June weekend brought a new box-office champ. Beverly Hills Cop II, then Predator, then The Witches of Eastwick, then Dragnet. Half a dozen other films are silly-season successes. And so the industry, even as it fretted about a strike threatened by the Directors Guild, entered July with high hopes for the best summer since Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Gremlins made the wickets blister...
Aykroyd's Friday is a smart parody and often a sharp instrument for social satire. Tom Hanks is not so lucky: he must represent relativistic contemporary values to Friday. It is simply not a fair fight. And both of them are overwhelmed by a story that unlike the old Dragnet TV plots, which were neat little slices of lowlife, is a mess of municipal corruption, pornography and religious-cult nonsense. As a result, the LAPD in this picture finally looks like a wholly owned subsidiary of the Beverly Hills cops...