At long, VERY long last, I’ve done it. I’ve listened to every episode of “Dragnet” I had downloaded. There were a few I had to skip due to poor sound, but I’ve easily listened to over 350 episodes. I had to go back through my blog archives to find my last Retro Radio Review, and it was my post on Broadway’s My Beat back in mid-June. That means it took me just over four months to get through Dragnet.
And I admit, I’m weirdly bummed out to be finished with it. There were some episodes that were a little tedious—whenever Joe Friday announced in his opening monologue that he was headed to bunco detail, ie the police detail dealing with check forgers and confidence men and women, I may have grimaced a little inside. But for the most part, I can see why Dragnet was a success, and why it’s still considered a landmark moment in radio history. The sound design is just incredible—not just the sounds of fistfights or gunfire, but the background noise. Whether it’s a scene set in a fairground where the actors are shouting to be heard over the music and crowd noise, or a conversation taking place in someone’s backyard with leaves rustling and birds chirping, there’s an attention to detail that is in stark contrast with any other radio show I’ve listened to so far. It actually spoiled an episode of Boston Blackie for me when I put it on—there was a fight scene set in what was supposed to be a burning building that was completely silent aside from the dialogue, and it was so ridiculous I had to turn it off.
I also came to love Jack Webb’s deadpan approach to narration. The way the episodes were ordered in my mp3 player meant that the last five or six episodes I heard were from the very beginning of the series, and it was really funny to hear the pilot episodes. There were some attempts—quickly aborted—at providing flashback scenes of a crime rather than the witnesses simply telling their story, and the chief of police seemed to have been mysteriously replaced by a bombastic theatre actor. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good melodrama, but it was refreshing to listen to a show with policemen who were believable as guys who’d spent so long on the beat they were no longer shockable.
I, on the other hand, definitely was. There were a few episodes that were unflinching in going for the jugular. Because I’m an animal person, I was particularly creeped out by one show in which a daughter stabbed her two pet canaries to death as a test run before killing her own mother, and another where a neglected teenager in search of attention fakes her own kidnapping, complete with beating her pet cocker spaniel to death for that final touch of verisimilitude. Yeesh. And yes, two episodes even made me cry—one in which a woman who’s tried to fake the abandonment of a love child she’s too afraid to tell her returning military husband about hears her husband end the episode by asking Sergeant Friday for a ride to the hospital because “I’d like to see my son,” and “Big Sorrow,” the episode devoted to Joe Friday’s grief after losing his partner, Ben Romero, which was prompted by Barton Yarborough’s actual death.
I’m not sure if there’s a larger lesson that’s come out of “Dragnet.” I certainly feel like I know the time period, and how radio shows worked in general, much better. I suspect if I’m mugged at any point in the near future, I’ll automatically respond in the same narrating-the-action way that the Dragnet officers reacted to any fight—“Watch it, Joe, he’s got a knife!!”. But I guess more than anything, the fact that I feel like I’m going to miss Joe Friday, Frank Smith, and Ben Romero is a (at this point in history, superfluous) sign of how successful the show was at creating believable, sympathetic, real characters in twenty-two minute chunks of audio. According to my Runkeeper, in the course of four months’ worth of work-week commutes, I’ve walked about six hundred miles with these guys. Not a bad beat at all.
I’ve owned 
