If any television series past or present could be called a tribute to the Los Angeles Police Department, it would be Jack Webb’s Dragnet. Dragnet ran on television in the 1950s and then several years ...

The police “crime and punishment” TV show Dragnet aired in 1952 and ran for eight years on NBC. One actor who made a guest appearance was future Star Trek star Leonard Nimoy who found the show’s use ...

Nearly 50 years ago, the NBC show Dragnet, the most influential police procedural ever, broadcast an episode that called for its hero, Sergeant Joe Friday, to debate fictionalized 1960s critics of ...

Every episode of “Dragnet,” the godfather of TV police procedurals that ran in the 1950s, began with these words. They were a promise that what viewers were about to see was a faithful re-creation of ...

“The story you are about to see is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.” And so began each episode of “Dragnet,” which premiered on NBC on this day in 1952 after a pilot ...

Dragnet migrated from radio to TV in 1951, at a time when the dominant style for crime stories was docu-realism with a noir edge. Dragnet writer-producer-star Jack Webb had a foursquare personality ...