Re: RARA-AVIS: The Police Procedural in the '50s

From: JIM DOHERTY ( jimdohertyjr@yahoo.com)
Date: 02 Feb 2003


Ed,

Re your comments below:

> All best for your mother's surgery.

Thanks. Mom came through the surgery safely and is now in ICU. Her recovery will be long so she's not out of the woods yet, but she can see the clearing through the trees.

Thanks to everyone at Rara-Avis who offered prayers and who sent words of encouragement on and off-site. They were very much appreciated and, aside from the help they gave Mom, which I'm convinced was considerable, they were a big help to me.

> Quick
> question: What do you think of the "new"
> Dragnet series coming to TV? Will it measure
> up to the original Webb?

I'm hopeful that it will be at least as good as Wolf's LAW & ORDER franchise on NBC. I doubt it will measure up to Webb at his best. Certainly it won't be as innovative in 2003 as it was in 1951, but it probably will be better than Webb at his nadir, which is to say the last couple of seasons of the 67-70 color series.

I'm not altogether thrilled about casting Ed O'Neill as Friday. Although he's a good actor (he did a very good job in Gene Hackman's role in a TV version of POPEYE DOYLE; and was fine as a cop in last year's short-lived TV series BIG APPLE), but there's no denying that he's carrying a lot of baggage thanks to MARRIED . . . WITH CHILDREN. And at 56, he's more than ten years older than Webb was when Webb started doing the revival, let alone the original series.

I'm not really familiar with Danny Huston, who was originally cast as Friday, but he looked good in pictures, and he's the right age (late 30-ish, early 40-ish) for the part. And he's John Huston's son and Angelica Huston's kid brother, which seemed like pretty good hard-boiled credentials to me. Frankly, though, if it was up to me, I'd've cast Miguel Ferrer.

Unlike a lot of y'all, I'm not a big fan of criminal protagonist stories, so, whatever happens with DRAGNET, I'm pretty sure I won't be tuning in its competition, KINGPIN.

JIM DOHERTY

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