The Rookies – ‘Blue Christmas’ (1974)

               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 between their careers and that of Aaron Spelling. He was hugely successful in four different decades (depending how generous you feel like being you could argue for five) and was unironically referred to as ‘the king of television’ by people who wouldn’t usually write such a stock phrase. He got his start as an actor with minor roles in shows such as “I Led Three Lives” and “Gunsmoke.” After he sold a script to “The Jane Wyman Show” in 1956 he started working full time as a writer on the Western anthology series “Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theatre,” which is such a great title. He then helped produce the Western detective series “Burke’s Law” for Four Star television, a show which was one of the first to rely on a guest-star each week. You can draw a direct line from this series to later Spelling efforts such as “The Love Boat” and “Fantasy Island.”

              In 1965 he set up Thomas-Spelling Productions along with comedian Danny Thomas. In addition to “The Danny Thomas Show” they made “The Guns of Will Sonnett,” “Rango,” and their breakout hit “Mod Squad.” They also produced a number of insane sounding tv movies, such as 1969’s “The Pigeon” starring Sammy Davis Jr., the tagline for which reads, ‘He's been beaten up, almost run over by a car, accused of an inter-racial romance, and beaten up again...all for a client he doesn't even have.’ There was also 1970’s ‘The Love War’ starring Lloyd Bridges and Angie Dickson, the summary of which is ‘Aliens from two planets at war come to Earth, assume human form and continue their battle.’ The latter is up on YouTube, the latter is up on one of those sketchy Russian streaming sites. You’re welcome.

              In 1972 Spelling set up a different company, Spelling-Goldberg Productions along with Leonard Goldberg, then an executive at Screen Gems.  Their first show out of the gate was “The Rookies” and it would later produce “Charlie’s Angels,” “Fantasy Island,” and a bunch of tv movies including “Satan’s School for Girls.” Another company of his, Spelling Productions, later to be renamed Spelling Television, would go on to make “Dynasty,” “Beverly Hills 90210,” and some unexpectedly highbrow efforts like the 1993 HBO film adaptation of “And the Band Played On.” To give you some idea of the size of his influence in the industry of the entire list of 31 different television shows I’ll be looking at this month he was directly involved in six of them.

What a lovely decade.

              With all this talk about Spelling, though, I’m in danger of overshadowing the actual creator of the show, Rita Lakin. Lakin was the story editor and head writer of “The Mod Squad” and has the story credit for the tv movie-of-the-week pilot episode of “The Rookies” which was broadcast on March 7, 1972. She also created a couple of other, shorter-lived series such as the prime-time soap “Flamingo Road” and the medical drama “Nightingales.” According to the wiki she’s credited with 464 episodes of television, eight tv movies of the week, and two miniseries. She also wrote a series of mystery novels starting with Getting Old is Murder in 2005.

              The pilot movie had the same basic premise as the show but with some cast changes. The movie featured five brand new officers while the show pared it down to three, ditching the characters of Jared Whitman and Kevin Lassiter. The other three were kept, those being Mike Danko as played by Sam Melville, Terry Webster as played by Georg Stanford Brown, and William Gillis as played by Michael Ontkean. Ontkean left after the second season and his character was replaced by Chris Owens as played by Bruce Fairbairn. The character of Mike Danko was the only married officer and in the pilot his wife, Jill Danko, was played by Jennifer Billingsley, but was recast for the series by a pre-“Charlie’s Angels” Kate Jackson. Their commanding officer, Eddie Ryker, was played in the film by the great Darren McGavin but was recast for the show with Gerald S. O’Loughlin.

              Functionally the show was just “Adam-12” with another half an hour added to the episode to focus on the personal troubles of the cast members. The premise of the show was to follow a number of rookie cops just out of the academy as they experienced life as beat cops, all the while being sternly mentored by their boss Lt. Ryker. The idea was to focus on a new generation of young people entering the service with different backgrounds from previous cop shows, involving such things as the Vietnam War and civil rights protests, while also digging into contemporary social issues that the Webb-produced shows were completely uninterested in. Format-wise this meant the show could continue the more-or-less random series of incidents approach to episodes based on supposedly real police cases but could also have the kind of soapy interpersonal conflicts that Spelling’s productions would come to be known for. It was a decent enough formula that worked for four years and 93 episodes. On a side note this is one of the few successful Spelling productions that doesn’t seem to be available for streaming in any way. It also only received a DVD release for the first two seasons so unfortunately the third-season episode rip I’m working from was obviously taken from a relatively recent broadcast, channel overlays and everything. I’ve worked with worse.

              This particular episode takes the format I’d described above, one half random vignettes and one half interpersonal melodrama, and separates the cast very neatly between the two. It’s Christmas Eve and the department has allowed all of the married officers to take the night off to spend with their families while the others have to work OT to make up for it. This means that cast members Mike and Jill Danko get to spend the episode dealing with her never before (and never again) mentioned sister and niece and their family drama while officers Webster and Owens get to have a normal episode of the show with a Santa hat tossed on top. We also continue the tradition of seeing LA in wintertime, and I have to admit that all of the California jokes I complained about in those old celebrity Christmas specials are starting to make a little more sense.

              Let’s focus on the family drama first because while it’s interesting it doesn’t really have much to say about the role of cop shows in contemporary culture. It’s mostly just a pretty standard episode of 70’s soapy ‘issue’ television. Jill’s sister and niece, Amanda and Tori (they don’t have credited last names), are visiting for the holiday as Amanda has recently separated from her husband Paul. This makes both of them fairly depressed about it and so Mike and Jill spend the episode trying to cheer them up. This eventually involves roping in their stuffy and prickly boss, Lt. Ryker, into playing Santa for Tori’s benefit. He eventually agrees but in the end it’s the errant husband Paul who turns up in the red suit for a supposedly joyous family reunion.

              For anyone else who perked up at the niece’s name, yep, Tori Spelling was born on May 16, 1973, about a year and a half before this episode aired. I think it was just a production in-joke or maybe even a complete coincidence, I can’t find any real parallels between the episode and anything in Aaron Spelling’s life. What’s interesting about this part of the episode is that it’s about the concept of divorce and not in any way about this specific divorce since they never actually say what the conflict between Amanda and her husband is. It’s implied that he works too much and she mentions that he’s been difficult to get in contact with since they officially separated about a week before the episode starts but that’s as detailed as it gets. Mike and Jill are hopeful that they’ll reconcile and neither says anything bad about him, so it’s at least implied that it’s nothing too bad. In a way I’m not surprised that none of these people have last names because they’re not really characters, they’re just placeholders for the ideas of Wife, Kid, and Husband. The show bends over backwards to avoid giving any specifics and even things that are problematic on their face aren’t seen as problems, such as that joyful family reunion taking place at around one o’clock in the morning because that’s when Lt. Ryker found the guy lurking outside in the hallway of the apartment building. The show isn’t actually interested in having an episode that looks at divorce, it wants to have A Divorce Episode. I found the simple assertion that any couple having problems just need a few days apart to realize how much they love each other somewhat lacking.

Pfft, silly woman, people in their forties can't be sexy!

              The other half of the show is the usual series of wacky hijinks for the other two series regulars with occasional tonal whipsaws as it randomly decides to work in some death and darkness to keep the audience on its toes. The first stop on their shift is answering an alert at a bar when a guy quietly drinking had suddenly started yelling and throwing stuff around. After they calm him down he apologizes and says he just got laid off two years shy of his pension and couldn’t handle going home to break the news to his family. The owner of the bar decides not to press charges since nobody got hurt and the guy’s so relieved he thinks he can go home to face his family now. This section is fine. In the next vignette they spot a kid working as a charity Santa on a rough street corner and stop to talk to him. He says he’s filling in for his dad who took a few bucks from the kitty to go buy “his medicine.” I didn’t realize that any shows ever actually used that euphemism for drinking, so points for that I guess. They escort him home off screen. In the next one they respond to a distress call from some other officers who are dealing with a crazy, shouty guy in a church. They quickly restrain him but one of the officers is extremely distraught, shakily talking about the things the guys was saying, about how he’d killed God and other blasphemous things. I was confused about why he was so upset until he and the camera dramatically swing around to show a priest shot dead on the floor, DUN!

              Next they respond to a report of a prowler by entering a little old lady’s apartment with guns drawn and pointed forward, which I’m going to question as a policy. They even keep the guns out as the woman pokes her head around a doorframe. It quickly becomes apparent that she was depressed about not getting a phone call from her son  who lives in New York, where it’s already 1am. They comfort her a little and as they’re leaving her son does indeed call, which is nice. Next they pull over and arrest a drunk driver in an uncharacteristically aggressive way, only revealing at the very end of the scene that the guy had just run someone over a couple of blocks before, DUN! Then they answer a disturbance call at a low-rent strip club, which you could show on network tv by 1974, apparently, which quickly devolves into a joke about how old the exotic dancer is. Nothing interesting to say here.

Sure, end on a slasher killer, why not.

              The last segment’s a doozy, though. The two officers respond to another call about a prowler, this time outside of a sorority house. They quickly roust a middle-aged guy hiding in the bushes who admits he was peeping. He starts insinuating to the officers that he just likes to watch, like with those movies, and that it’s no big deal. I guess they can’t say the word ‘porno’ just yet but they make it clear that’s what he’s talking about, and as his insinuations gets sleazier and sleazier the officers get more and more uncomfortable. One of them rustles around in the bushes and finds a sack containing gloves, a ski mask, and a big butcher’s knife, which means that one of the final segments of this Christmas episode shows the main characters interrupting a psychopath just before the start of an incidence of spree killing. I’ll point out that seminal proto-slasher film ‘Black Christmas’ was released in the US just four days after this episode broadcast, so I guess something was in the air that year.

              The show ends on a happy note, with the weary cops returning to their shared apartment the morning after their shift to find Mike and Jill already there with breakfast waiting for them. They explain that after Amanda and her husband reconciled they let them stay the night at their apartment and thus had to find somewhere else to crash. The breakfast is by way of apology. Webster drops his usual wiseguy persona to give everyone a heartfelt “Merry Christmas” and the episode ends on a group hug.

              This was not a bad episode of television, but it’s also not something I have any interest in watching again. Everyone on the show was fine with the possible exception of Bruce Fairbairn as officer Owens, who I thought was a little weak. The only actor that popped for me was Georg Stanford Brown as officer Webster, and while it’s hardly a shame that he later moved into becoming a very successful television director I feel that he really could have anchored a more grounded dramatic show if given the opportunity. While it only lasted four seasons and has basically been forgotten by the larger public I can tell when a show has decent bones. This is the kind of ensemble crime show that’s going to show up again and again as I go through this month and it’s a bit of a shame that it’s as inaccessible as it currently is.

The F.B.I. – ‘Dark Christmas’ (1972)

               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 noticed during my research that this show was a Quinn Martin joint, a name that came up constantly while Frank Conniff was on the show, so I was already anticipating that little dopamine rush of recognition.

You're damn right it's a Quinn Martin Production!

              Not everything MSTK ever talked about was exactly to my tastes (don’t think I’m ever going to warm to ‘7 Faces of Dr. Lao’) but I could at least understand the appeal, so I was really looking forward to seeing why just about everything was referred to by the puppets as ‘a Quinn Martin production’ And now that I have I’m more than a little disappointed because it turns out that, judged by this episode, he made really bad television.

              Quinn Martin was genuinely quite a big deal in his heyday. What Jack Webb was attempting with his production company Martin actually achieved. He got his big break at Desilu Productions as an executive producer on the original tv movie pilot of “The Untouchables” and branched out from there. He set up his own shop in 1960 and had an early hit with “The Fugitive,” which ran from September of 1963 to January of 1967. Other series that were high-profile at the time but have largely been forgotten included “The Invaders,” “Cannon,” “The Streets of San Francisco,” and “Barnaby Jones.” For a comparison think of Stephen J. Cannell or Dick Wolf. He had a network television series running every year from 1961 through 1979, almost all of which were crime dramas in one way or another. They all had a common format, including an announcer who would invoke the title at the beginning of the show and title cards breaking the episodes into acts after each commercial break. That same announcer would also intone at the beginning of every episode of every show he made that it was “a Quinn Martin production,” answering that question from my childhood.

              With a title as generic as “The F.B.I.” you wouldn’t think this show would be an adaptation of an existing property, but that’s exactly what it was. In 1959 Warner Bros. released the movie ‘The FBI Story,’ itself an adaption of the 1956 non-fiction book of the same name by journalist Don Whitehead. The film, starring Jimmy Stewart, was heavily overseen by the agency itself, with J. Edgar Hoover acting as an uncredited producer. Several scenes were reshot at Hoover’s direction in order to paint their operatives in as positive a light as possible. Two agents were assigned to oversee the entire production and the final film had to earn Hoover’s personal approval.

Um, thanks?

              This tight control over production was extended to the television version as well. An agent by the name of Clyde Tolson was assigned to oversee the show, a person that’s going to ring a bell with anyone even passingly family with the agency’s history. He was second in command of the FBI from 1930 to 1972 and rumors have long swirled about his relationship with Hoover. He was not a particular fan of the show and often attempted to get it cancelled over its inclusion of violence. He exerted control over every plotline and characterization, which included casting. To quote from the Wiki: “Actors playing F.B.I. agents, and other participants, were given background checks to guarantee that no "criminals, subversives, or Communists" were associated with the show.” This didn’t seem to impact it’s popularity as it ran for nine seasons between September of 1965 and April of 1974 and was in the top 30 shows in the ratings for seven of those years. Their one and only Christmas episode was during its eighth season, so its entirely possible that for the first seven it was a different, better show, but I somehow doubt it.

              This is very much a show of two distinct halves. One follows our main characters and the other follows the bad guys they’re after. This is an utterly standard variation on crime shows. So far this month we’ve only looked at shows that stick to their main characters as they either solves mysteries or respond to alerts, but having a guest star of the week that we watch perform nefarious actions as our good guys slowly close in on him is perfectly familiar to fans of the genre. What’s slightly different in this episode is that I couldn’t find a single interesting thing on either side of the conflict.

              Let’s get the side with the stars of the show over with first because I have no time for them. Despite having just watched the show I couldn’t tell you the name or position of a single character or even one distinguishing feature or personality trait between them other than federal agent. The FBI side of “The F.B.I.” is, as far as I can tell, a rotating cast of largely indistinguishable middle-aged white men who mill around desks and pass pieces of paper between each other before the scene cuts to awkward action, often but not always related to what they were talking about. People are forever explaining plot points to each other and thus the audience with no clear method established for how any of that information was obtained. They’re constantly handing over reports or getting anonymous tips from informants or departments about the things happening on the other side of the episode with no explanation on how they know any of it. Our bad guys will have a meeting and the FBI will be hot on their heels … somehow. At one point an assassin buys a gun from a guy in the middle of a random field and the agents have both arrived at the scene and set up a cordon around the area in the time it takes for a guy to eat a sandwich. The cordon doesn’t even work that well as the assassin needs to get away since we already saw him menace the target’s wife in a flash-forward during the cold open and that hasn’t happened yet.

They do not let you forget it's Christmas time.

              According to IMDB the main characters of the show were Lewis Erskine, played by Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Arthur Ward, played by Philip Abbott, and Tom Colby, played by William Reynolds. I’m sure that’s true. There’s an entire section of the opening credits that flashes both the names and faces of the actors and if I did a split screen of the episode and some headshots I’m sure I could even tell which was which, but as someone completely unfamiliar with the show before this episode the scripts and actors did absolutely nothing to distinguish one character from another. Some of them were in offices more often than some of the others, presumably the ones sitting behind desks issuing orders were in charge of the others but that’s just a guess.

              While it completely fails to work dramatically I guess I can understand the point of all of this from Clyde Tolson’s point of view. His job wasn’t to make the show more interesting or more dramatic, it was to make the public think a certain way about their agents: that they were smart and powerful, all knowing and all seeing. The idea that the agency had avenues of information everywhere, tendrils in every plot and informants around every corner, is a good image to get out there if you want to be thought of as an impressive and dependable arm of the federal government. Their agents are everywhere, know everything, and always get their man. What this does to a tv show is make it completely impossible to care about any of the characters because they don’t seem human. They don’t have failings, don’t have foibles, don’t have personality traits as far as I can tell. I’m sure there are episodes where the interchangeable men mention their homes lives, complain about their wives, do something other than discuss the case in front of them, but they certainly didn’t in this episode.

              If none of the main characters can be human because they’re too busy being crime-fighting machines you’d think they could beef up the bad guys and make them interesting, but they either couldn’t or were prevented from doing so by the cold hand of Clyde Tolson. If the heroes have to be good guys to the point of boredom, the bad guys have to be actually bad guys, or instead broken beyond repair. They can’t be attractive in any way. The main character that the feds are after, a professional killer by the name of Stuart Tilden (played by character actor Don Gordon, who’s vaguely familiar), ends up being slightly interesting seemingly by accident but in the end is revealed to be a small, empty man easily taken down by the super agents. He’s even fiercely told off by a housewife at the climax and then captured without a shot being fired.

What the fuck am I supposed to make of Sandra Locke with a blowtorch?

              The actual plot of the episode is genuinely hard to follow. As near as I can tell there’s a criminal based out of Puerto Rico who’s been smuggling gambling machinery into the United States. A high-level employee of the legitimate side of his business quit some time before the start of the episode and the bad guy is now worried, apparently for no actual reason, that he’s an unacceptable risk and hires Tilden to get rid of him. This involves the assassin tracking down and investigating known associates from city to city despite the fact that the employee’s not hiding, he just moved. I think my confusion about this part of the plot is mostly my fault as it didn’t occur to me for some time that it was genuinely hard to find someone in 1972 if you didn’t already know where they lived. The employee in question isn’t hiding and since he had no idea of the illegitimate side of his former employer’s business he doesn’t have the faintest idea that his life is in danger. Most of the episode is the killer slowly tracking down this guy while the FBI creeps up behind him while he and his family are blissfully ignorant.

              The episode spends a lot of time with Tilden and in a normal television show you’d think we’d explore his character. What makes a hired killer, how does he operate, what secrets does he know, that sort of thing. Turns out he had a sucky childhood which made him a loner and an asshole and there’s not a whole lot more to him than that. For a decent chunk of the episode he rents an apartment while he’s waiting for information and starts a very awkward flirtation with one of his new neighbors, played by a distractingly young Sandra Locke. They have what’s meant to be a meet-cute in the hallways that’s probably supposed to distract us from their eighteen-year age difference. He’s rude and borderline offensive to her and she just eats it up. There are a couple of scenes where she invites him over to her apartment where they spend some awkward time together under the distrustful eye of her mother. They make very fractured small talk while she uses a blowtorch to make glass decorations. In a later scene while Tilden is on his way to commit the murder it’s revealed that the mother has been faking her disability and just as Sandra is declaring her independence the FBI show up and tell her that the man she’s been crushing on is a killer and then leave. The two characters reconcile, the mom is now supportive, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with any of this.

The thrilling climax!

              Occasionally the show checks in on the target’s wife and kids, usually emphasizing that they’re waiting for daddy to get home for Christmas, and the final few scenes take place after Tilden has shown up and enveigled his way inside. Eventually the wife figures out what’s going on through the clever method of listening as he simply tells her. They send the kids to bed to wait for the target to show up, and while Tilden and the wife are arguing in the living room the feds show up, sneak the kids out the back, send a guy inside to pretend to be a stranged motorist, and easily apprehend the professional assassin. The episode ends with a happy little celebration as dad gets home and the feds smugly head out.

              I did not like this episode of television. One of the supposed advantages of a show about federal agents is that it can be set anywhere and the antagonists can be followed across state lines, but generally speaking you don’t want to fracture an episode by setting scenes in seemingly random places one after another. The show moves from New York to DC to Denver to Puerto Rico and from one office to another in such a sloppy way that I was completely confused about what specifically was happening at any given time. I understood generally what was happening and what the stakes are, but a lot of my notes are simply questions like: who the hell is Guido? How did they know where this house was? Why is the assassin happy to show his face to the wife and kids when he could just hang out in a car outside? Was it really this hard to get a gun in 1972? Between the disconnects between the two halves of the show and the inability to follow actions between scene transition I was utterly disconnected from everything that happened. If the show ran for nine seasons it was presumably popular for a reason but I find myself completely confused as to why.

Adam-12 – ‘Log 122: Christmas – The Yellow Dump Truck’ (1968) / ‘Christmas’ (1974)

               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 initial run. In order to develop the series Webb contacted Robert A. Cinader for help as he knew him from this time at Warner Bros. While they developed the show Cinader pitched Mark VII on a related series that would focus on beat cops on their day-to-day patrols. This synced well with Webb’s own sensibilities and lead to the creation of “Adam-12.”

              The premise of the show was simple: follow around a patrol car with low-lever officers as they went on their daily routine. ‘1-Adam-12’is the radio call sign for their car, and although that wasn’t a real call sign it was in the correct LAPD format as this show prided itself on its accuracy and verisimilitude as much as any of Webb’s other productions. The cases were once again drawn from the files of the LAPD and once again the relationship between the show and the higher ups in the police was tight and mutually beneficial. To give some idea as late as 2003 the LAPD resurrected the 1-Adam-12 call sign for officers who had demonstrated “outstanding duty performance.” They hadn’t forgotten the service Webb and his shows performed for them.

              The cast remained largely static for the entire seven-season run. The main cast members were Martin Milner as Pete Malloy and Kent McCord and Jim Reed. Malloy was the veteran, introduced in the pilot as having just lost his partner and considering retirement when he’s partnered up with the rookie Reed. The first two seasons were non-chronological, jumping around in time but gradually depicting a thaw between the more by-the-books Malloy and the more empathetic Reed. All of the episodes in these seasons started with a seemingly random ‘log’ number. This was dropped for the third and subsequent seasons as slowly the show began developing the characters. The two central chracters would slowly achieve advancement over the course of the series, with Malloy ending up as a Sergeant and Reed ending the series applying to be a detective. Their private lives were occasionally mentioned but almost never intruded upon the episodes themselves.

              Again we have a dramatic police procedural with episodes only lasting half an hour, but unlike the structure of “Dragnet,” where they consider an individual case each episode, “Adam-12” is almost picaresque in nature. Since the show is following beat cops they don’t investigate cases or follow up on leads, they simply patrol and interact with the public as they come across them. They wander from incident to incident either by stumbling across something on their patrol or by answering calls from their dispatcher. There’s usually a small runner through the episodes, a problem or situation that’s introduced at the beginning and usually resolved by the end, but there are anywhere from three to seven or so other smaller incidents over the course of the half hour. To pick an episode at random, here’s the IMDB summary for season 4, episode 14: “Woman reports a pickup truck bumped her car. When she stopped, they stole her purse. On patrol they spot a stopped car with the hood up. Driver says his engine over heated but a stakeout shows him meeting with a counterfeiter. A call about loud noise results in a citizen chewing out the officers. A scuffle at a food drive-in results in the arrest of a man for outstanding warrants. A cruise by the house with noise turns up the pickup and two men who robbed the woman.” This structure doesn’t change for something small like the holidays.

See? Everyone got along fine in 1968.

              The show only did two Christmas episodes, one in the first season and one in the last. Other than the actors having visibly aged and the model of the car changing there’s not a whole lot to demonstrate that six years have passed in between episodes, even though 1968 and 1975 were very different years. One big change from “Dragnet” is that this show is in color, which underlines how bright and sunny Christmas in Los Angeles usually is. Despite the Christmas decorations everywhere and a running plotline in both episodes that are specifically about getting ready for the holiday it’s somewhat surreal to watch everyone wandering around in short sleeves in December.

              The show’s first Christmas episode was in its first year and so the show was still finding its feet somewhat. The episode opens in a way that “Hill Street Blues” would later steal, namely by showing the briefing given to the officers at the start of their shift. They wrap up the assignments by reminding everyone to grab a few bags of presents as they’ll be distributing them to specific needy families over the course of their shifts. We see Malloy and Reed stop by the first of their families, an apparent single mom with two kids. It’s very odd to see a tv show set in LA just three years after the Watts riots for a couple of cops to show up at the house of a Black family and have a young girl happily announce back over her shoulder, “Mom, the cops are here!” While they’re waiting for the mom to come out they have a brief conversation with her little boy, who proudly announces that he’s going to get a yellow dump truck for Christmas. They try to gently suggest some of the toys they know they have in their car but he’s having none of it. When the mom finally comes out she asks if she can meet them later in the parking lot of a nearby grocery store so the surprise isn’t ruined for the kids. Since these are fictional cops they readily agree and continue on with their day. This is the runner for the episode.

              Malloy and Reed have a fascinating little conversation in the car about the dump truck. They know they don’t have one in the donated toys, so Reed starts to suggest that they buy the kid one. Malloy scoffs at the suggestion and shuts it down instantly. In the next scene they’re distributing more toys and Malloy feels the need to justify his decision. He tells Reed, “You can’t let yourself get bent out of shape every time you see somebody unhappy in this job. You get involved up to a point, beyond that you go screaming up the walls.” This is a decently complicated point, acknowledging their duty to serve the public while maintaining boundaries that allows them to maintain their professionalism and own well-being. It’s about the dumbest way I’ve heard that idea expressed and I don’t think I’m going to shock anybody when I reveal that over the next few scenes Malloy grudgingly gives in to his better impulses and chips in with Reed for the dump truck.

Some things are always funny.

              They meet up with the mom in the parking lot and transfer the toys. Next up they’re driving around when they come across an obviously drunk driver weaving his way over both sides of the road in the middle of a subdivision. They follow at a safe distance and tell him to pull over several times, then he finally crashes harmlessly into a bush. The entire scenario is played for laughs as the driver is a Red Skelton-style cartoon drunk. They haul him down to the station where they have him breath into this huge breathalyzer machine, which apparently wasn’t portable back in those days. It’s an opportunity for hijinks at the precinct. After they get him booked they start heading out but run into the mom from before, who’s there reporting her car stolen. The cops are crestfallen that the toys were still in the car. They check with a clearly overworked guy from the traffic detail who gives them a couple of tips of where to look but cautions them not to get their hopes up.

              As night falls they’re called to a domestic disturbance call, which decades of reality cop shows have taught us are some of the most dangerous and fraught kind of calls but which here is again played for laughs. A couple argues sitcom style about their spending habits and Christmas traditions and just as the cops put together an O. Henry style happy ending by persuading both of them to open their presents to each other it kicks off again and the scene fades out like a commercial break in a sitcom. As they’re driving away from the scene they hear over the radio that another couple of cops have found the stolen car, so the final scene of the episode is Malloy and Reed persuading the cop in charge of the case that they don’t need to hold onto the toys as evidence and get them released in time for the kid to enjoy his yellow dump truck. We don’t actually get the scene where they return the toys to the grateful family but it’s still a happy ending.

              The next episode is a full six seasons later and with such a large time jump we can see the plot escalation bloat in full swing. The format of the show is the same and the cops haven’t changed their characters. The thing that’s most obviously different is that the show has swapped a 1968 Plymouth Belvedere for a 1972 AMC Matador. And while the half-hour picaresque structure is still the same we have a radically different set of interactions with the public.

The 70's was a rougher time for our boys.

We get our episode runner over with first, as the officers are called to a noise complaint. A nice old guy is sat out on his lawn practicing the bagpipes because it’s too warm inside. He says he’s getting ready for the Christmas party at the local retirement community that’s going to be shut down soon. They persuade him to go inside and give him a tip about a local Christmas tree lot where he can get a good deal. Once that crisis is handled they get a call about a delivery van stolen from a nearby warehouse. When they get their the owner is in a near-panic as the van was hauling radioactive material for hospital use, but it can be fatal if someone removes the materials from their protective casings. This is a pretty big step up a cartoon drunk driver. An offscreen helicopter soon spots the van abandoned by one of LA’s empty rivers and when they get there the thieves are gone along with one of the containers. They quickly track them down to a storm drain and arrest them at gunpoint. After that they’re right back on the street because apparently paperwork on the theft of radioactive materials isn’t particularly urgent.

After they thwart possible terrorists there’s a comedy scene of a guy who’s spotted siphoning gas out of his own car to hide the fact that he smells like his mistresses’ perfume. After that they swing by the Christmas tree lot and help the bagpipe guy from before snag a cheap tree. Reed wants to use the patrol car to help him deliver the tree to the retirement home, even letting the guy from the lot mount the tree on the car, but Malloy says absolutely not. As they’re arguing they get a call about a robbery and they tear the tree from the roof in their haste.

They get to the liquor store after the robber has already left and as they’re getting details a sniper starts shooting at them from a nearby rooftop. As they’re taking cover the guy’s wife runs out sobbing, begging them not to kill her husband, who’s apparently depressed. After some back and forth they take the guy into custody without bloodshed. As they’re wrapping that up their boss swings by not to congratulate them on recovering stolen radioactive materials or bringing in a rogue sniper but to chide them about getting spotted with the Christmas tree on the roof of their car. Once that comedic scene is over we get a rare glimpse of the cops in their civies as they go back to the tree lot after their shift is over to deliver the tree to the retirement community. The episode ends in a bright, sunny fashion as they both haul the tree into the Christmas party to the sound of bagpipes.

Look at what they took from us.

By modern standards this is an incredibly strange show. Leaving aside the half-hour format there just aren’t these kind of vignette-style shows where every episode simply features a day in the life of the main characters. Sometimes a longer-running show with break these out as a kind of palette cleanser, and opportunity to dig into the characters without having to worry about larger, longer-running storylines. With any other cop cop the theft of radioactive materials or a random sniper would be the focus of the entire episodes, not maybe a third of one between them. In addition to a desire to merely entertain the shows clearly had a propaganda purpose, showing cops and helpful and professional, people able to be relied upon. In both episodes the cops end up paying a little bit out of their own pockets to help members of the community out of the goodness of their own hearts. This kind of naivete was already strained when the show started in 1968, it overwhelmed most people’s ability to suspend disbelief by 1974 and it’s hardly surprising that the show ended at the end of its seventh season. I think that’s why the plots started to get so ludicrous, they had to keep people’s attention somehow.

Outside of the deliberate propaganda underlying the show’s portrayal of its hero cops, it’s not a bad show. The characters are unrealistically nice but they are pleasant to spend some time with and it’s nice to pretend every once in a while that the police could be friendly and helpful. It took me forever to realize where I recognized both actors from: Martin Milner played an evil lawyer in 1960’s ‘Thirteen Ghosts,’ and Kent McCord played John Crichton’s dad in “Farscape.” They’re both fine in these roles and it’s enjoyable to spend half an hour with them. The shows leans a little bit into how surreal Christmas in LA can be and it doesn’t take itself very seriously. It’s a much less intense show than “Dragnet” and I can see how it would be pleasant to sit on a couch in 1971 and let the antics wash over you.

The Untouchables – ‘The Night They Shot Santa Claus’ (1962)

               Near the end of 1930, Attorney General William Mitchell at the direction of President Herbert Hoover sent a small team of Prohibition agents to Chicago to bring down Al Capone. The head of this team was Elliott Ness, a member of the US Treasury Department. Under the auspices of the DOJ he put together his own team of agents made up on those he deemed to be both brave and incorruptible. This caught the attention of the press, who christened them ‘The Untouchables.’ They managed to severely impact the flow of illegal alcohol to Chicago and assisted with Capone’s conviction in 1931 on tax evasion charges. His band of agents then disbanded, their mission complete. What this tv show supposes is, maybe they didn’t?

              In reality, after Capone went down Ness’ life didn’t go that great. He married and divorced several times and moved from one government position to another. All the while his drinking started to become a problem. He left law enforcement in 1944 but never had much luck with a business career. By the mid-50’s he was near-penniless and reduced to drinking at his local bar, telling stories from his glory days. In 1956 he met reporter Oscar Fraley, who saw an opportunity. Although the book is credited to both of them, from the structure it’s pretty clear that Ness told Fraley a lot of old stories and the reporter cleaned it up and arranged everything into book form. Scholars have argued ever since how much of what’s in the book is accurate, which dovetails nicely with criticisms of the show. Ness died of a heart attack on May 16, 1957, just before publication of the book.

              It was a publishing phenomenon, ultimately selling 1.5 million copies, which directly led to both the tv show and the movie of the same name. A two-episode pilot was made by Desilu productions in 1959 and aired as a part of CBS’s “Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse.” This covered Ness’ activities against Capone and ended with the mobster’s conviction and imprisonment, which is also where the memoir ended. When a full series was pitched to CBS about their further fictional adventures they passed. ABC was interested and picked up the show, where it ran for four seasons and 118 episodes. It starred Robert Stack and was incredibly popular, often featuring prominent guest stars and even getting its own parody episode of ‘Top Cat.’

              I’m going to be much less critical of this show than I was for “Dragnet” for a couple of reasons, the most important being that I don’t consider it to be nearly as influential a show as that was. It’s been said that this was the inspiration for a lot of other subsequent crime shows starring teams instead of a singular hero, and while that might be true for the show as a whole the episode I watched was basically just a showcase for Robert Stack as Ness. In addition the series was explicitly pitched to the audience as a throwback to another time period, a full thirty years in the past. In structure and tone it’s closer to a film noir than any kind of recognizable police procedural, and while Ness and company certainly violate any numbers of rights and laws in their fevered pursuit of colorful gangsters it’s in the context of over-the-top violence in a heightened version of Chicago. People could mistake the cops in “Dragnet” for those in real life, much harder to do that with agents brandishing tommy guns in fancy nightclubs.

              Normally in even an off-format version of a television show you’ll get some idea of the general structure and characters that make up a show. That is not the case with “The Untouchables,” as it operates closer to an anthology show than any kind of ongoing procedural in the modern sense. The cast fluctuated over the course of the seasons, which makes sense, and only Robert Stack as Elliot Ness and Walter Winchell as the breathless narrator appear in every episode. The members of his squad were deliberately diverse for the time, including Nicholas Georgiade as Ness’ right-hand man and Official Italian Enrico Rossi. The early episodes, especially the pilot, leaned hard into an Italian stereotype of the mobsters, to the point where it led to protests and boycotts, so the show toned down the thick accents on the bad guys and made it a point that the second most prominent character on the show was explicitly Italian. There was also Abel Fernandez as William Youngfellow, Steven London as Jack Rossman, and Paul Picerni as Lee Hobson. I say diverse, a couple of the characters were vaguely ethnic. Although they do appear in this episode these characters have very little to do. They mostly complain about working on Christmas Eve and accompany Ness a couple of times as he follows up on leads.

They really make it clear the kids saw everything.

              Episodes of the show would hop around chronologically and events in previous episodes almost never affected later ones. There were recurring villains of a sort in mobsters Frank Nitti and Joe Kulak, but just as often they’d feature a one-off character that Ness would claim to have a long and deadly rivalry with who had never been mentioned before and would never be mentioned again. In this episode he claims that he’d known the main murder victim for ten years even though Ness would’ve only been 27 at the time. They simply did not care about factual accuracy if it got in the way of a script. Despite being the first episode of the show’s fourth and final season this is set relatively early in the activities of The Untouchables, Christmas of 1930. This would mean that although it’s never mentioned Capone would have still been a free man at this point.

              This episode works very well as a nihilistic little b-movie. It spends the entire runtime proving what a gullible sap Elliot Ness is and ends with he and his men realizing that everyone involved in bootlegging, no matter how tangential, can never be trusted. Near the end a gangster openly laughs in his face at how naïve he is and the ending narration basically advises the audience that he was correct to do so. I really shouldn’t have been shocked at how dark a show this was considering that I’d already seen “Dragnet” really linger on the face of that dead kid.

              The episode opens strong. We see a Santa handing out presents in an orphanage. The camera focuses on the two kids who are going to have lines later and then he takes his remaining presents and leaves, waving goodbye to all of the good little boys. The moment he’s outside he gets gunned down by a passing car and the camera pans over to the orphanage window to show that the two boys witnessed everything.

              Ness soon arrives at the scene, having been alerted by local law enforcement. It turns out that the dead Santa was an old friend of his, Hap Levinson. From the framing and the musical sting that accompanied the reveal of the character’s face beneath the false beard I assumed that this was a recurring character on the show and his death was the whiz-bang opening to the season but no, brand new character. Ness briefly reminisces with the cops about how everyone knew Hap and what a great guy he was. Ness mentions that even though Hap was on the other side of the law, being in the long-term employ of mobster and nightclub owner Mike Volny, they still played cards regularly and hung out. He talks about a ‘treaty’ he’d had with Hap, how when he went through the front door as a Fed it was understood that Hap would sneak out the back door through the kitchen. Apparently kitchens in these clubs were considered neutral territory of a sort. Ness goes on to say that although they’d been friends for a long time and Hap had never asked him for a favor. The cop agrees that everyone liked him and he was just a harmless little guy. Ness finds only one present left in his Santa sack, addressed to someone named Renee.

The sets in this show!

              The rest of the episode is Ness going from person to person and getting his mind blown about just how much he didn’t know his friend Hap. While everyone at the orphanage agrees how swell a guy Hap was they swear they don’t know anyone named Renee. He goes to see Hap’s widow Bertha, played by the always dependable Ruth White. She’s very over the top in both her grief and the way she swears that Hap never brought any of his work home and claims she has no idea what might have gotten him killed. It’s mentioned that Hap might have witnessed a murder done by his boss Volny, but she swears he didn’t. She also says she doesn’t know anyone named Renee.

              Back at the office the others have brought in one of Volney’s gangster rivals named Brikka. He swears he had no reason to off Hap but does point them in the direction the girl he had on the side. Ness gets angry at the implication but the gangster doesn’t care. Ness then goes to Volny’s nightclub, and this must have been established earlier in the show but Ness strides past table after table of people openly drinking and makes directly for the kitchen and nobody pays him any mind. I guess they were picking their battles in those days? He has a guarded conversation with one of the cooks in the kitchen on what they both refer to as neutral ground. He doesn’t get anything from him so he goes to bother the showgirls in their dressing room. They also all swear they don’t know anything, that Hap was a great guy and he wouldn’t have a girl on the side.

              As Ness is walking back to his car an older woman from the dressing room pulls him aside and starts to destroy Ness’s image of Hap. She tells him his friend was no angel. She says Renee used to work there but stopped showing up after she hooked up with Hap. She gives him a name, which gets him an address. We cut to an apartment where we see Renee in a near-frenzy tearing the place apart. Ness shows up and gives her the present from the Santa sack. She clutches at the present and admits they were an item. She refuses to open the present while he’s there and stonewalls him until he leaves. The moment he’s gone she tears it open and screams in frustration when it’s just a necklace. She immediately gets on the phone and calls Volny’s nightclub in a tizzy.

              There’s been a plotline percolating in the background of the entire episode that takes center stage here. Nightclub owner Volny was accused of shooting someone after hours in his bar and all of the suspected witnesses have been killed one by one. Hap was one of them, although he’d sworn he hadn’t seen anything, and even if he had he was such a harmless and loyal guy that none of the cops could believe that Volny would off him. Ness gets word that the last of the witnesses has resurfaced and turned himself in for protection. When Ness arrives at the police station Hap’s widow is there to admit that she’d lied during their earlier conversation. Ruth White is much better in this scene when her character is telling the truth. She admits that not only did she know about the affair she also knew that Hap was the real bookkeeper for Volny’s operation and was involved in everything that was going on. He’d even witnessed the murder.

Already stressed about Mary Richards.

              Ness then hears the story of the shooting from the last witness. It’s a decent little scene, with an incredibly young Ed Asner playing low-level mobster Jimmy Canada. The camera holds tight on his face, completely uninterrupted, for almost two minutes as he monologues about the murder. He confirms that Hap was there and admits he expects to be the next one killed and only turned himself in to the police in order to make it until Christmas. While he’s still reeling from the news about his old friend Hap, Ness and the police are happy they finally have a witness against Volny. They start to form plans but are interrupted by a call from that older lady from the club, telling them a hit’s been put out on Renee.

              The agents rush over to the apartment in time and manage to fight off the assassin sent to kill her, although Renee is wounded in the process. In the aftermath she admits that she’s a junkie, thus explaining her earlier actions, and says that Hap was a junkie as well. Turns out Volny knew about Hap’s addiction and tolerated it for a while, but once he became a witness to murder he just couldn’t take the chance that his bookkeeper would crack. One of the agents calls in the incident and finds out that while they were rushing over to save Renee the clocks ticked past midnight and their only witness hanged himself in his cell.

              A furious Ness goes back to the nightclub, where Volny has resurfaced now that all of the witnesses are dead. He openly mocks Ness to his face, and when the agent threatens to bring him in laughs and says since all the witnesses are dead he’s got no case. Ness loses his temper and smacks him across the face a couple of times, which makes the gangster laugh even more. He sneer at Ness, “When you came through the back door to the kitchen, you thought you were on neutral ground, but you weren’t. Hap Levinson was using you! Oh no, there was no fix, nothing like that. But your friendship, your friendship with Hap was his passport with every cop on the streets of Chicago. He was using you!” Ness hauls him away, and the episode ends as Walter Winchell grimly informs us that Volny stood trial for both murders and was found innocent both times. The last line of the episode is “Elliot Ness and The Untouchables now knew there could be no neutral ground in their war against organized crime.”

Guy just humiliates Ness. On Christmas no less.

              As an episode of television I think this is pretty great. The budget for the time must have been extraordinary, considering the number of extras, sets, costume changes, and how crisply everything was shot and edited. When I said this could have been a solid B-move I wasn’t kidding, I’ve seen studio releases that weren’t constructed as well. I’d be much angrier at the actions of the cops in the episode if I thought it was trying to be realistic in any way. The show is so obviously historical nonsense, from the age of Ness to the idea that this gang of agents just ran around Chicago for half a decade doing whatever they wanted, that I don’t think it was viewed at the time as anything other than pure entertainment. It certainly inspired later television shows and got Stack his later gig with “Unsolved Mysteries,” but it didn’t get approval from any law enforcement for its storylines and certainly didn’t claim to be educating the public. I’m happily surprised at how well the show’s held up and how much it used the Christmas trappings of the episode to throw the nihilistic message into sharp relieve. I can easily recommend it to anyone who can look past the black and white photography and appreciate a nice little retro slice of stylish nihilism.

Dragnet - ‘The Big .22 Rifle for Christmas’ (1952) / ‘The Big Little Jesus’ (1953)

               Despite its reputation, “Dragnet” was not the first radio or television procedural that claimed to accurately portray the activities of a police department. It’s not even the first to do so for the LAPD. “Calling All Cars” was a radio program that ran from November of 1933 to September of 1939 that advertised itself as dramatizing actual police cases handled by the Los Angeles Police Department. “Gangbusters” drew its cases from police departments nationwide and started on the radio in January of 1936. It made the jump to television in March of 1952, but despite decent ratings was cancelled after “Dragnet” became such a hit that it was seen as unnecessary. This is pretty indicative of its general reputation, it succeeded to the point where people forgot its predecessors.

              There were also a number of movies that claimed such authenticity, including one that directly led to the creation of “Dragnet,” the 1948 crime drama ‘He Walked by Night,’ in which Webb had a small part. He was already an established radio presence by that point, having hosted a few short-lived programs during the war as well as starring in the private-eye crime series “Johnny Madero, Pier 23” and “Pat Novak, for Hire.” In the film Webb played the minor role of police forensic scientist Lee Whitey. The movie itself was loosely based on the criminal activities of former police officer Erwin Walker and was shot in a quasi-documentary fashion. It was during production that Webb met the movie’s police consultant Marty Wynn, a sergeant from the Robbery Division of the LAPD. Together they came up with the idea of a police procedural that aimed to portray the duties of police officers without the bombast and hysterics of other programs. They specifically wanted to include more non-dramatic storylines and cases, as well as show the more hum-drum day-to-day activities of the officers.

              What I didn’t realize until doing research is how much of an overlap there was between the radio and television versions. For some reason I assumed that when the show made the jump from radio to tv they would have discontinued the original, but in the early 1950’s radio was still a viable competitor to tv so of course they made both. The radio show ran from June of 1949 through February of 1957 for a total of 240 episodes, and the tv show ran from December of 1951 through August of 1959 for 276 episodes. Naturally there was a lot of overlap between the two with repurposed scripts being very common. They kept the same titles between the two versions and most of the script adjustments were only due to the medium change. They even sometimes managed to use the same actors.

              What I also didn’t realize is that the episodes are only half an hour long. For a while the show was paired in its timeslot with the aforementioned “Gangbusters,” also just half an hour, but after that show’s cancellation it was often paired with programs such as “Ford Theatre (in Color)” or “You Bet Your Life.” It seems a little weird at first that a dramatic police procedural would only take half an hour, but it becomes clearer when you realize the show is just the first half of “Law & Order” with the entire second half dispensed with by a couple of lines at the end assuring the audience that they caught the bad guy and he totally went to jail. I can’t independently verify this as I haven’t watched every episode but according to the wiki no criminals apprehended by the characters on the tv show were ever found not guilty, although this rule was bent for the radio version. This dovetails nicely with the police never shown as doing anything wrong.

It occasionlly looks all right.

              In every important respect it doesn’t matter what Jack Webb intended when he created “Dragnet.” As always a system must be judged on what it actually does instead of what it was meant to do, and what this show did was teach police departments the value of good propaganda. From the little research I’ve done I think that Webb really did see dramatic potential in a more stripped-down, drier police procedural that could boast about its authenticity. This quest for realism in some areas, including basing many if not most of the cases in the series on actual police files, meant securing the cooperation and eventual endorsement of the LAPD itself. This also meant agreeing to certain limits on the way the show portrayed the force if it wanted to keep that access, which quickly led to a fictional portrayal of the LAPD that was wildly divorced from reality. James Ellroy has spent much of his career trying to show the parts that “Dragnet” left out. L.A. Confidential is set during the exact time period of these episodes and is basically a book-length tirade against the image that Webb spent his life building up.

              By all accounts Webb was a stickler for accuracy and verisimilitude. They used actual LAPD call signs and internal police terminology to accurately portray the structure and operations of the police department itself. According to some the foley for the radio show even correctly recreated the number of steps between various offices in the main precinct. Webb frequently rode along with officers on their patrols and was given extensive access to all areas of the LAPD once the officers in charge understood what he was trying to do. All of this is meant to bolster the show’s credibility, but for me it quickly curdles into yet more evidence that everyone involved must have known of the deep rot at the center of the force but deliberately chose not to include it. As evidenced by his involvement in later shows such as “Emergency!,” which covered the newly created California EMS service and is credited with familiarizing the public with the services of the department, public education was very much on his mind. I simply question what he did and did not choose to educate the public about.

              I should address the naming convention first. From the beginning the radio program would occasionally have episodes entitled ‘The Big _,’ with the blank being whatever the episode was about. Starting early in 1950 they began naming all the episodes this way, which carried over into the television show. The late 60’s revival didn’t keep this practice. Both of the tv episodes I’ll be looking at started as radio episodes, the first being ‘.22 Rifle for Christmas’ which originally aired December 22, 1949 and was adapted for television on December 19, 1952. Fans were likely very familiar with the episode by then as they’d repeated the radio version each subsequent Christmas. ‘The Big Little Jesus’ aired on the radio December 22, 1953 and on tv just three days later. This episode would go on to replace the other one as the annual Christmas episode for reasons that will become clear later.

Retail used to be a lot goofier.

              There are very few differences between the radio and tv versions in terms of subject matter and dialogue. The biggest ones I noticed were the radio broadcast including both sides of telephone conversations and having to verbally establish scene changes, while the television version just shows one side of these conversations and works in the missed details through added dialogue. In terms of what I’m concerned about there aren’t any important differences between the two. Other than Joe Friday the show’s characters don’t matter a whole lot either. Their personal lives are alluded to but never intrude into the episodes. The only character that lasts for the entire series is Webb himself as Friday. Early in season two he gains a permanent partner in Frank Smith, played by Herb Ellis for a handful of episodes until he was replaced by Ben Alexander for the rest of the series. As luck would have it our first episode is Ellis’ last.

              ‘The Big .22 Rifle for Christmas’ was somewhat controversial when it was first broadcast as it managed to upset the NRA. Back then it was a much different and less influential organization than it would become, but the episode explicitly comes out against buying guns for children which, up until fairly recently, was the standard stance of police forces nationwide. After a strident sponsor message from your friends at Chesterfield Cigarettes the episode opens with the standard stentorian voiceover telling the audience they’re watching “Dragnet.” Then Webb comes on with his typical faux-Chandler dialogue over some very interesting shots of Christmas in 1952 LA. “This is the city. All year round it wears work clothes, on holidays it dresses up. To most people Christmas brings happiness and prayer. To some it brings heartbreak, and my job gets tougher. I’m a cop.” Friday and his partner would get shuffled around the various departments as the episodes demanded, and he informs us that this week they’ve been detailed to homicide.

              I’m not going to lie, this episode’s a bit of a downer. They get a call from patrol about a young boy who’s been missing for a couple of hours. When Friday asks why homicide is being bothered they’re told the officer answering the call found blood at the scene. Soon enough a gaggle of middle-aged white guys in suits and hats are wandering around some lady’s backyard. The episode takes a good minute and a half to show a forensic tech testing for blood and gathering a .22 rifle casing left nearby. It seems like wasting time at first, but this was fairly new technology they’re showcasing to a public who is still getting used to the idea of fingerprints. Friday and partner wander inside and talk to the kid’s mom, who over the course of a couple of minutes’ conversation with actual cops manages to start working herself up into a worry. They ask about any guns in the house, which naturally makes her suspicious, and she tells them that in addition to her husband’s .45 there’s a wrapped rifle in the closet that’s meant as her son’s Christmas present. She digs around in the closet and finds that the box is there but the gun is gone. The music dun DUNs into commercials at the reveal that the rifle is a .22.

Bit darker than I expected, to be honest.

              It soon turns out that another child in the neighborhood has gone missing, and soon after they meet with his mom they’re told that the original kid has returned home but won’t talk to anyone. Short story shorter it turns out that the kid found his present in the closet and while he and his friend were playing with it in the woods out back his friend tripped and shot himself dead. He leads the officers back to where he hid the body with leaves, so a few days before Christmas in 1952 one of the most popular shows on network television broadcast a dead kid into living rooms nationwide.

              The episode does try to end on something of a positive note. There really hasn’t been a whole lot for the officers to do up to this point as all they’ve done is wander around and ask people questions, but what they have done is strategically withhold information. They don’t tell any of the parents about the blood stains in the backyard for reasons I don’t quite understand, and when these parents naturally wonder why the police keep asking about gun models they lie and say its standard procedure. This changes when they find the body and the kid tearfully admits he feels like he killed his friend because he’s the one who wanted to play with the gun. They handle this part all right, reassuring the kid he’s not going to go to jail, but then there’s a very odd section when they have to break the news to the dead kid’s father. He’s been offscreen this entire time and when he gets home he immediately asks whether his son has come home yet. We’ve seen this scene a thousand times in the years since this episode aired so I was just floored when Joe Friday, our stoic hero, only drops his eyes at the question and doesn’t say anything. When the father asks if they’ve found his boy he just nods. The dad calls out to his son and asks again where he is, again Friday lowers his eyes and says nothing. The father asks him whether he’s hurt, Friday quietly says “Yes,” the father again asks where he is, Friday says he’s “hurt pretty bad,” and after a couple more stuttery questions the father realizes his son is dead. And then walks into the next room where the dead kid is lying in his bed. Considering the amount of pride Webb took in being authentic I guess this means that this is just what the LAPD did with small corpses back then.

              The father breaks down over his son’s body, going on about the wonderful toys he bought him for Christmas. He asks what happened and Friday is suddenly able to talk again, letting him know it was an accident he had while playing with another kid. The father immediately stands and says he wants to see that boy and strides out of the house and down the street. Friday and his partner are completely at a loss, just trailing along behind the father as he marches to the other kid’s house. Friday even tosses in the voiceover line “We had no idea what the dead boy’s father had in mind. We didn’t feel we should try to restrain him.” Keep this in mind for later. The dad bursts into the house and upon seeing the still-crying kid tells him he knows it wasn’t his fault and that he’s going to give all of his dead son’s presents to him. Everyone tearfully smiles at the gesture. I question whether this happened in the actual case file but I can understand why they ended the episode this way.

Happy ending?

              The second Christmas episode, “The Big Little Jesus,” is an altogether lighter affair. It’s essentially the Dragnet version of a distaff funny one. This time around they’re attached to the robbery division and get a call on Christmas Eve that a Jesus statue has been stolen from a Catholic church’s nativity scene. Here’s some trivia: the interiors for the church were shot at Old Mission Plaza Church, which a caption proudly states was founded in 1781. It’s a nice looking church. Friday and his partner travel around interviewing people including the priest, some parishners, and the eccentric owner of a religious supply store before getting a tip from one of the altar boys that they saw someone taking a small package away from Mass that morning.

              They quickly track the guy down to the cheap lodgings he’s staying in and find that he’s out at the moment. The manager lets drop that he was arrested for burglary sometime in the past and thus they’re sure they’ve got their guy. Friday even drops a clever little line to that manager about how this guy’s apparently remembered his old ways. They go back to the station just long enough to have what I will bet any amount of money is a completely fictional conversation with their chief. He wants them to follow up on a tip about a wanted man, they want to keep following up on the missing Jesus statue. The chief asks how much the statue is even worth when Friday genuinely says the line “When’s the price determine a case?” Uh, since forever, Joe? They get one over on the chief by telling him to call the priest and say he’s out of luck, which shames the captain into letting them continue. Luckily they get a call that the guy is back at the lodgings and they go and grab him.

              This is the only interesting part of the episode as it’s the only one that shows them interacting with a suspect. When they identify themselves and say they want to take him downtown he directly refuses, saying he’s not going to go anywhere or say anything. Friday just grabs his arm and marches him out of the door. We cut to the station where the suspect is sitting at their desk, silent, as he has been for several hours. Eventually they wear him down and he admits to a fender bender but insists he had nothing to do with the stolen statue. They believe his story and let him go, then glumly return to the church to admit they failed. While they’re talking to the priest a little kid comes in pulling a wagon, inside of which is the statue of the little baby Jesus. The kid explains that he prayed really hard for a wagon for Christmas and promised to give Jesus the first ride if he got one. All of the adults smile and the episode ends on a high note.

Webb knew where to put the camera somtiems.

              What’s interesting to me here is that I don’t know how legal it was at the time for them to haul that suspect in for questioning. I’m going to assume completely. The Supreme Court ruling establishing the Miranda warning didn’t take place until 1966. By happy coincidence this episode was remade in 1967 during the show’s revival under the episode title ‘The Christmas Story.’ The script is basically identical except for one key line: during the scene transition where they take the suspect to the station Webb inserts a line in voiceover: “5:15pm. We took Stroup to the office. On the way we advised him of his rights.” This is the only acknowledgement that the intervening decade and a half happened at all. A neat piece of trivia for the remake episode: with the exception of the actor playing the suspect all of the adult actors with speaking roles came back to play the same parts fourteen years later.

              In and of themselves nothing in either of these episodes is particularly alarming. The police are portrayed as professional and focused on serving the community. They are generally respectful and helpful and even decide to do a favor for a priest on Christmas Eve. Completely shorn of context these are even pretty good episodes of television. ‘.22 Rifle’ is structured very strangely, with too much time given over to unimportant forensics and a truly strange twist at the end, but it had a straightforward message that it conveyed simply and directly, namely that you shouldn’t buy firearms for children. ‘Little Jesus’ was much better in its structure and even had a couple of nice shots in it. Both were directed and at least co-written by Webb himself, and he had a decent ear for dialogue and a solid enough screen presence that his performance is still being referenced today.

              The problem comes in when you take into consideration that context. The success of “Dragnet” led directly to other programs under Webb’s Mark VII Production umbrella, including shows like “Emergency!,” “The D.A.,” and especially “Adam-12” that all crossed over with each other. In addition to that it provided a template for tv shows going forward. “The Lineup” started in 1950 and was produced with the explicit cooperation of the San Francisco Police Department. “Highway Patrol” sprung up in 1956 and claimed to be "based on authentic stories from the files of highway patrol headquarters throughout the country.” “Police Station” ran for 39 episodes in 1959 and portrayed the inner workings of, well, a police station. While the impulse to tell these stories varied from show to show the reasons behind the police departments supporting them was both easy to understand and completely out in the open: they wanted to get the public to view their employees as heroes and not the corrupt incompetents they’d been traditionally portrayed as.       

              It’s hard to remember because we’re living on the other side of a successful propaganda campaign but for the first few decades of motion pictures the police were usually portrayed as either indifferent, corrupt, or actively useless. This is one of the reasons film noirs have aged as well as they have, they correctly show police officers as either getting in the way or tools of a corrupt system. This is why it matters how the show portrays those small moments of interaction with the public as it’s teaching the public both what to expect from officers and how they should respond to them. Just as that first episode spent so long with the forensic tech to show the public how that worked, so too are the conversations between civilians and the cops teaching the public how they should behave. We’re so bombarded by mass media depictions of things we’ll never experience firsthand (to the point where we’re starting to lose track of the difference between fiction and reality) that it’s hard to remember that this show is likely the first time many of the viewing public had ever seen even a fictional police officer.

I know they meant this is a good thing, but sheesh.

              So little things like lying to a worried parent matter because what the show is doing it teaching viewers that the cops were correct to do that. Same thing with the suspect in the second episode, where Friday grabs his arm and marches him down to the station. They’re nice to him once he’s there and let him go, but he still lost a few hours to harassment and there’s every chance he’s going to get kicked out of his accommodations because of that snarky little line Friday dropped to the manager about the suspect’s rocky past. We don’t see any of that, though, we’re left with the cop characters beaming paternally at the rest of the characters at the end of both episodes despite the fact that, functionally speaking, the police didn’t actually do anything to help anyone.

              I’ve spent as long as I have on these two episodes because “Dragnet” really is ground zero for most of the rest of the shows I’ll be watching this month. Hopefully not all of them. It wasn’t the groundbreaking procedural it’s often made out to be, most of its ideas were already being played around with by other shows, but it was put together in a tight little package and was enough of a pop-culture phenomenon that it set the tone for so many other shows in the future. It’s also a fascinating little time capsule of LA in the mid-50’s, with mostly functional camera work and enough clipped dialogue that it feels like a nice little bit-sized capsule of noir. If it hadn’t set the template for so much cop-washing to come it would be easier to enjoy.