Word: webbs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Vance and Sam Spade are only shadowy figures in the public mind. Dragnet's most recent Nielsen rating (60.6) indicates that 16,332,000 of the more than 27 million U.S. television set owners are tuned to NBC every Thursday night by the time Webb speaks his terse introductory line: "My name's Friday...
...show's top rating, however, is an inadequate gauge of the spell which Webb has cast over the U.S. people, both young and old. There is hardly a child above the age of four who does not know and constantly voice the brassy notes (dum du dum dum) of Dragnet's theme music. Phonograph records (St. George & the Dragonet, Little Blue Riding Hood, Christmas Dragnet) which parody Dragnet's terse, low-keyed dialogue have sold 1,326,000 copies, and Sergeant Friday's calm "All we want are the facts, ma'am" has become...
...flood of Dragnet fan mail suggests that the U.S. completely forgets that it is a nation of incipient cop haters when its eyes are glued on Webb's show; that it has gained a new appreciation of the underpaid, long-suffering ordinary policeman, and in many cases its first rudimentary understanding of real-life law enforcement. As Sergeant Friday-a decent, harassed, hard-working fellow-Jack Webb is such a convincingly realistic detective that many a cop has written in to ask if he is not a genuine member of the Los Angeles Police Department...
Slice of Life. Dragnet's realism is simply a byproduct of Webb's lust to entertain. As director, story editor, casting chief and star of the show, he purposely refrains from dramatic artifice, and thus achieves a different kind of dramatic effect. Seldom has the slice-of-life technique of storytelling been so successfully transmitted to film. Dragnet is not a whodunit at all, and both murder and the sound of gunfire are rare on its shows. Webb sometimes produces truly frightening effects (as in The Big Jump, a film in which he struggles with a madman...
...waitresses, children and bewildered ordinary citizens who people Dragnet seem as sorrowfully genuine as old pistols in a hockshop window. By using them to dramatize real cases from the Los Angeles police files-and by viewing them with a compassion totally absent in most fictional tales of private eyes-Webb has been able to utilize many a difficult theme (dope addiction, sex perversion) with scarcely a murmur of protest from his huge public...