Adam Graham

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.

It's not always bad, but because so much of it is dedicated to making up or imagining what the criminals might or could have said, it's hard to say that

it resembles reality much, particularly in episodes where that takes up, you know, more than half the running time.

What Dragnet decided was that the investigation itself was interesting.

A process by which police catch criminals is interesting, and there is drama in that and around that.

And the great advantage of telling the story of the investigation, and that being the core, is that we do have, from the police files they use to write the cases, the actual story and evidence.

Now, of course, there are changes made to that for radio, and some of it is, as the opening said, to protect the innocent.

Some is to protect the production team from lawsuits.

And some is to make the story work within the frame of a half-hour radio program that's about two Los Angeles detectives.

So there are all sorts of changes that...

can be necessary.