Dick Wolf is a great TV producer/creator, his Law and Order shows are some
of the best in TV history. BUT, to do a remake on the original Dragnet was
a
huge mistake. First off, Jack Webb was a true genius of the day. He was
the
first to do the cop show thing and set the bar so high that its never been
reached. The reason why Dragnet and Adam-12 were so good was that they
were
the first of their kind, and they were extremely 'real' as far as police
tactics. No,Jack Webb was not trying to do,' Citizen Kane' here, but put
110% of his writhing and research into 'real LAPD' policy. So perhaps the
actors were a little stiff, the police tactics were very real. No one
really
knew then what a cops job was. So Jack Webb and company showed us.
Remember
all the lectures he would give about report writing? Almost every show he
would harp on the fact that a cop writes pages and pages of reports.
Remember when Jim Reed, (Kent McCord) shoot and kills a suspect for the
first time? The whole show was about his waiting to be interviewed by
Internal Affairs Division and showed the incredible amount of stress at
that
time.(Kent McCord should have won an Emmy for this show, he had tears in
his
eyes he was so shock up) One of the best Dragnet episodes was, "Eulogy For
A
Pig", about an officer killed in a officer involved shooting. The whole
show
was narrated by Jack Webb. Those shows were so good that they make all
these
'modern' cop shows look like Disneyland. God bless Jack Webb.
|
