Between 1949 and 1970, there wasn’t a squarer crime drama than “Dragnet.” The creation of actor-writer-director-producer Jack Webb, “Dragnet” started as a NBC radio show, but proved so popular that the broadcaster insisted on a televised version as well. Webb was at the helm of both series, which sought to give viewers/listeners insight into the day-to-day drudgery of police work. Webb, who portrayed main character Sgt. Joe Friday, raised the stakes as needed to keep his audience engaged, but the major takeaway from each episode was that cops steadfastly operate by the book to serve and protect their communities. Needless to say, “Dragnet” was a crock.
After two seasons of low ratings, “Dragnet” left the airwaves in 1958, but when parents of unruly, pot-smoking, protest-happy hippies developed a craving for law-and-order, Webb brought the show back to television in 1967. If “Dragnet” was square in its previous incarnation, it now played as unintentional self-parody. Webb once again starred as Joe Friday, and was paired with future “M*A*S*H” star Harry Morgan (equally stolid as Officer Bill Gannon). They occasionally dealt with cases that highlighted the youth-destroying evils of the day (most notably in the infamous 1967 episode “The LSD Story”), but Friday never dropped his “Just the facts, ma’am” demeanor. It was all incredibly silly, and off the air by 1970.
Still, “Dragnet” lived on in syndication, where it could be ridiculed from the couch in between bong rips. It was a pop cultural punchline by the 1980s, which made it grist for parody. This led Dan Aykroyd and writer Alan Zweibel to write a movie wherein the former, doing a note-perfect Webb impersonation, would play the no-nonsense detective nephew of Joe Friday whose approach to policing is out of step with the modern world. How did that work out?
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Dan Aykroyd’s Joe Friday is just about the only reason to watch Dragnet
Dan Aykroyd as Sgt. Joe Friday yelps and crosses his eyes in Dragnet – NBC
When “Dragnet” hit theaters during the summer of 1987, it had two selling points: Aykroyd’s uncanny Webb impression, and the buzzy music video for “City of Crime,” which featured both stars rapping back when it was funny to watch woefully unhip white dudes rap. Reviews were mixed (even with two thumbs up from Roger Ebert), but the film did decent business, grossing $57 million against a $20 million budget. For a while, it’s a hoot to see Ayrkroyd’s Friday, a stickler for procedure, contend with ’80s dirtbags, and he’s a great, disapproving straight man for Hanks’ goofball Detective Pep Streebek. But rather than operate as a full-blown meta parody of Webb’s terribly dated series, it becomes a standard-issue ’80s action comedy in the mold of “Armed and Dangerous” or “Beverly Hills Cop,” at which point the laughs mostly vanish.
Aside from Aykroyd, the highlights are Dabney Coleman as a lisping porn kingpin and Christopher Plummer as a minister who is clandestinely the head of a religious cult. There’s also one big laugh at the end regarding Friday’s quaint courtship of “the Virgin” Connie Swail (Alexandra Paul). But you can’t help but wish Aykroyd, Zweibel, and director/co-writer Tom Mankiewicz would’ve had more fun with the series’ rigidly humorless formula.
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