Summary: Dragnet was created and produced by Jack Webb, who starred as the terse Sgt. Friday. Webb had starred in a few mostly short-lived radio programs, but Dragnet would make him one of the major media personalities of his era. Dragnet had its origins in Webb's small role as a police forensic scientist in the 1948 film, He Walked by Night, inspired by the actual murder of a police officer in Los Angeles. The film was depicted in semidocumentary style, and Marty Wynn (an actual LAPD sergeant from the robbery division) was a technical advisor on the film. Webb and Wynn became friends, and both thought that the day-to-day activities of police officers could be realistically depicted, and could make for compelling drama without the forced sense of melodrama then so common in radio programming.
