Don't Always Disagree

                On August 28, 1963 the bodies of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert were found in their apartment in Manhattan. Both of the victim’s families were prominent and relatively wealthy and thus a media firestorm ensued. It was dubbed the “Career Girl Murders” because both of the young women had moved to the city and found jobs, which was apparently notable enough to justify the name. Months passed of intense investigation while the NYPD came under increasing media pressure to produce results. In April of 1964 a young Black man by the name of George Whitmore Jr. was accused of an unrelated rape and was found to have in his possession a photograph of a white woman that the police decided looked like one of the victims, despite the family’s denial and evidence of who the person actually was. After many hours of intense interrogation Whitmore was pressured into a confession. The police immediately announced that th...

                SWAT, meaning Special Weapons and Tactics and referring to a specially trained division of a police force, was created as a term in 1964 by the Philadelphia Police Department. It came in direct response to a series of violent bank robberies that the city was finding difficult to respond to. This escalation of force proved unsurprisingly popular with other police departments, with the next major association to take up the unit being the LAPD in 1967. Tellingly one of the key implementation managers for Los Angeles PD, inspector Daryl Gates, wanted the acronym to mean ‘Special Weapons Attack Team,’ which I think gives a good idea as to where their heads were at. This adoption was made after the widespread freakout in law enforcement circles after the Watts riots in 1965 and was sold to the public as a response to lone-gunmen scenarios and a direct counter to the increased firepower available to civilians...

                I usually dislike clever nutshelling of pieces of entertainment by describing them as combinations of other works. “Monk” is ‘Rain Man’ meets “Sherlock Holmes,” that sort of thing. It’s usually lazy thinking. The problem is that “The Rookies” really is “Adam-12” meets “The Mod Squad” because that was literally the intention behind the producers, combining the supposed realism of the former with the melodrama and focus on contemporary issues of the latter. I really should have known what to expect when I saw Aaron Spelling’s name in the opening credits. We might as well dig into his background because I’m going to be watching quite a few shows with his involvement this month.               I’ve mentioned prolific producers before in Jack Webb and Quinn Martin, but it’s no shame to either of them to say there really is no comparison betwe...

                I spent a number of my formative years drinking from a modest firehouse of pop-culture references I had no knowledge of or context about courtesy of Mystery Science Theater 3000. This was before the internet and the show certainly didn’t pause to explain itself, so for every reference to The Hobbit or ‘Blade Runner’ I did get there were three or four I didn’t. Many of them were about the cultural detritus of the thirty or so years preceding the show, anything from the mid-fifties on, and it’s been surprising how often I’ll still run across a theme song or a line of dialogue and get a brief burst of recognition. That’s already happened a few times this month, especially during the “Dragnet” and “Adam-12” episodes (I finally get the Mark VII references during “The Day the Earth Froze,” for example) and normally I don’t see them coming, but when I was putting the original list together for this month I n...

                After “Dragnet” went off the air in 1959 Jack Webb and his Mark VII Productions fell into a bit of a lull. They’d managed to get a number of other shows briefly on the air, such as “The D.A.’s Man” and “Pete Kelly’s Blues," but none of them lasted more than a single season. Webb himself was briefly an executive producer for the anthology show “GE True” in 1962, and then just as briefly acted as head of Warner Bros. Television starting in February of 1963. Many of the changes he made, such as completely overhauling “77 Sunset Strip” for it sixth season leading to its cancellation, were disastrous and he was considered officially out of touch with the emerging cultural consensus. In 1965 he was approached by Universal Pictures to produce a “Dragnet” television movie, the resulting film turning out so well that NBC decided to revive the series, possibly the first time a show was resurrected after its init...