The Joys of Intellectual Free Time
As often happens after I do a stint in a hotel room, I've been thinking about
Jack Webb
As some of you know, I insist upon referring to many of the current procedural crime dramas (Law & Order, CSI, that one about missing persons, etc) as "Dragnet Spin-Offs" (Or rip-offs, depending on my mood). In spite (or perhaps because) of their lack of originality, they are pretty much the only thing I find watchable on 21st-century television, which I generally only see when there's a TV in my hotel room.
Today I decided to intellectually resolve an issue that has long nagged at me in this regard (see, I really have a lot of free time right now!). This is the question of Perry Mason. Is it possible that Perry Mason, not Dragnet, was actually a bigger influence on Law & Order, "the one that started it all?"
To analyze this properly, it is important to consider the genres and sub-genres involved. Perry Mason is clearly a "courtroom drama," as is the last half of each Law & Order episode. Well and good, but Perry Mason didn't invent the courtroom drama, they had been around in a variety of media, including stage, film, radio drama, and novels (I'd count Harper Lee's _To Kill a Mockingbird_ as one example), for quite some time. Perry Mason was, in fact, originally a series of books in the 1930s-50s. Perry Mason may in fact be _the_ definitive television courtroom drama, however, so further investigation is necessary.
Jack Webb, in creating Dragnet (originally a radio show), has been hailed with creating the "procedural police drama." This consists of a heavily fact-based depiction of the resolution of a crime using actual police methodologies. The characters in Dragnet, as the characters in Law & Order, do what cops do - interview lots of people, get lied to, run up false leads, sometimes arrest the wrong person, etc, etc. They don't use unorthodox methods, like Sherlock Holmes or Jim Rockford do, or if they do, they get into trouble themselves.
Here we have reached a point where it is worthwhile to look at the umbrella genre for everything I'm discussing: The Whodunit (or "Mystery"). Dragnet is a whodunit, it simply happens to have been the first whodunit to be labeled a procedural police drama. Perry Mason is a whodunit, although it is also a courtroom drama. Some courtroom dramas, like Kramer vs Kramer, are not whodunits, but for now they do not concern us. The whodunit is classically traced to Edgar Allen Poe, who wrote two short stories ("The Purloined Letter" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue") concerning a M. Dupin, a brilliant logical deductivist who is almost certainly a model for the later Sherlock Holmes. Dupin, like Holmes, was a private individual in no way attached to the police who solved crimes through deductive reasoning and the gathering of clues (I believe that one or more of the film versions of "Rue Morgue" have since transformed him into a police detective). However, it has been argued that the whodunit's origins should be sought in an important transition in newspaper and magazine stories about crime that took place around the end of the 18th century. Prior to this time, "true crime" reports were concerned mainly with the criminal's dying confession, his repentance at having defied God, and his sorrow for the feelings of the victims and their families. In short, it was an emotional, human-interest based reporting. The change took place when reporters began t feel it necessary to give the facts of the case, when audiences began to want reports that helped them decide whether the accused was actually guilty or not. True Crime books today continue to present a great deal of data regarding the tracking and prosecution of criminals, as if their purpose is to convince a skeptical audience that Charles Manson really is guilty of the crimes he suffers for.
Where Dragnet contributed to this genre was to suggest that ordinary police methods _are_, in fact, the best of all possible means to solve a crime, while protecting the privacy of those investigated. They may be slow, they may be tedious, but they do work. Dupin and Holmes aside, I won't claim that there had never been a whodunit in which a police detective was the hero prior to Dragnet. But, those heroes were still seen as being above the normal level of ordinary policemen, they were unorthodox, brilliant, and sometimes defiant of their superiors. Sergeant Joe Friday is none of these things. He is cop, doing his job, by the book. And he always gets his man. This is exactly how the modern Dragnets operate. This is one reason modern audiences have such a hard time with the radio show and early black & white series - there's very little action (the later color series, where Frank Morgan replaced Ben Alexander, attempted to inject a bit more).
So, back to courtroom whodunits. Perry Mason is very much the traditional "defiant" private detective. He is a defense attorney, who just happens (luckily) always to be hired by an innocent person. In order to prove that person innocent, he catches the real criminal. He uses unorthodox methods, as one judge acknowledged, saying, "...from time to time you seem to find yourself in predicaments from which you extricate yourself by unusual methods which invariably turn out to be legally sound" (quote pulled from Wikipedia, originally from one of the novels).
The Law & Order lawyers are of a very different stripe. They are prosecuting attorneys, working for the District Attorney's office. They do, sometimes, prove that a person arrested by the police is innocent of a crime in the process of their investigations. But they do so using orthodox legal procedures. Their objective is not to prove a given person is innocent, but rather to see a guilty party punished within the standards laid down by the law. I would argue that these are Dragnet characteristics, not those of Perry Mason.
I still say that every episode of Law & Order should begin with a big thank you to Jack Webb.
of late.
Jack Webb
As some of you know, I insist upon referring to many of the current procedural crime dramas (Law & Order, CSI, that one about missing persons, etc) as "Dragnet Spin-Offs" (Or rip-offs, depending on my mood). In spite (or perhaps because) of their lack of originality, they are pretty much the only thing I find watchable on 21st-century television, which I generally only see when there's a TV in my hotel room.
Today I decided to intellectually resolve an issue that has long nagged at me in this regard (see, I really have a lot of free time right now!). This is the question of Perry Mason. Is it possible that Perry Mason, not Dragnet, was actually a bigger influence on Law & Order, "the one that started it all?"
To analyze this properly, it is important to consider the genres and sub-genres involved. Perry Mason is clearly a "courtroom drama," as is the last half of each Law & Order episode. Well and good, but Perry Mason didn't invent the courtroom drama, they had been around in a variety of media, including stage, film, radio drama, and novels (I'd count Harper Lee's _To Kill a Mockingbird_ as one example), for quite some time. Perry Mason was, in fact, originally a series of books in the 1930s-50s. Perry Mason may in fact be _the_ definitive television courtroom drama, however, so further investigation is necessary.
Jack Webb, in creating Dragnet (originally a radio show), has been hailed with creating the "procedural police drama." This consists of a heavily fact-based depiction of the resolution of a crime using actual police methodologies. The characters in Dragnet, as the characters in Law & Order, do what cops do - interview lots of people, get lied to, run up false leads, sometimes arrest the wrong person, etc, etc. They don't use unorthodox methods, like Sherlock Holmes or Jim Rockford do, or if they do, they get into trouble themselves.
Here we have reached a point where it is worthwhile to look at the umbrella genre for everything I'm discussing: The Whodunit (or "Mystery"). Dragnet is a whodunit, it simply happens to have been the first whodunit to be labeled a procedural police drama. Perry Mason is a whodunit, although it is also a courtroom drama. Some courtroom dramas, like Kramer vs Kramer, are not whodunits, but for now they do not concern us. The whodunit is classically traced to Edgar Allen Poe, who wrote two short stories ("The Purloined Letter" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue") concerning a M. Dupin, a brilliant logical deductivist who is almost certainly a model for the later Sherlock Holmes. Dupin, like Holmes, was a private individual in no way attached to the police who solved crimes through deductive reasoning and the gathering of clues (I believe that one or more of the film versions of "Rue Morgue" have since transformed him into a police detective). However, it has been argued that the whodunit's origins should be sought in an important transition in newspaper and magazine stories about crime that took place around the end of the 18th century. Prior to this time, "true crime" reports were concerned mainly with the criminal's dying confession, his repentance at having defied God, and his sorrow for the feelings of the victims and their families. In short, it was an emotional, human-interest based reporting. The change took place when reporters began t feel it necessary to give the facts of the case, when audiences began to want reports that helped them decide whether the accused was actually guilty or not. True Crime books today continue to present a great deal of data regarding the tracking and prosecution of criminals, as if their purpose is to convince a skeptical audience that Charles Manson really is guilty of the crimes he suffers for.
Where Dragnet contributed to this genre was to suggest that ordinary police methods _are_, in fact, the best of all possible means to solve a crime, while protecting the privacy of those investigated. They may be slow, they may be tedious, but they do work. Dupin and Holmes aside, I won't claim that there had never been a whodunit in which a police detective was the hero prior to Dragnet. But, those heroes were still seen as being above the normal level of ordinary policemen, they were unorthodox, brilliant, and sometimes defiant of their superiors. Sergeant Joe Friday is none of these things. He is cop, doing his job, by the book. And he always gets his man. This is exactly how the modern Dragnets operate. This is one reason modern audiences have such a hard time with the radio show and early black & white series - there's very little action (the later color series, where Frank Morgan replaced Ben Alexander, attempted to inject a bit more).
So, back to courtroom whodunits. Perry Mason is very much the traditional "defiant" private detective. He is a defense attorney, who just happens (luckily) always to be hired by an innocent person. In order to prove that person innocent, he catches the real criminal. He uses unorthodox methods, as one judge acknowledged, saying, "...from time to time you seem to find yourself in predicaments from which you extricate yourself by unusual methods which invariably turn out to be legally sound" (quote pulled from Wikipedia, originally from one of the novels).
The Law & Order lawyers are of a very different stripe. They are prosecuting attorneys, working for the District Attorney's office. They do, sometimes, prove that a person arrested by the police is innocent of a crime in the process of their investigations. But they do so using orthodox legal procedures. Their objective is not to prove a given person is innocent, but rather to see a guilty party punished within the standards laid down by the law. I would argue that these are Dragnet characteristics, not those of Perry Mason.
I still say that every episode of Law & Order should begin with a big thank you to Jack Webb.
of late.