Adam Graham

Because these were essentially recordings of policemen actually out on calls.

It was like cops, but over radio.

So, not scripted at all.

I do feel I can't give you a full answer to the question, though.

Because most of these series I have encountered...

But I think to list them all in order, it would require having listened to them in enough depth that you could definitively and intellectually explain why you thought, if you did, that the FBI and Peace and War was a more realistic series than Calling All Cars.

It's also hard to measure the accuracy of an entire series, particularly when a lot of it might be missing.

Although, I guess in my opinion, there's one clear winner and leader in the category, and that's Dragnet.

I think there are many ways that

dragnet wins and that's not because they don't occasionally change facts to suit the needs to simplify the case to get it to air or to ensure they don't lose their audience or whatever other reason where i think dragnet wins if i were to put to the one central fact is

It is what they say at the start of the episode.

You will walk step by step on the side of the law through an actual case from police files.

And that following this from the side of the law means approaching the case differently.

A lot of these true crime programs, particularly in the pre-Dragnet era...

would spend a lot of time with the criminals and focusing on their side of the operation rather than looking at how police or the FBI were able to track them down.

You see the problem with this when you reach an episode where all the criminals involved and all potential witnesses ended up dying.

It just becomes readily apparent those scenes are based on dramatic imagination, and really in most episodes that would be the case, with writers imagining what the criminals would or did say based on, at best, educated guesses.

Because I think most of these programs focused on the idea that

crimes were interesting, that true crimes, things that actually happened and crimes that were committed that shocked people, that's interesting.

And I think that, by and large, there's a sort of heightened level to the performances and to the writing to make it dramatic.