I went back to watch the Carson bit. The closed captioner on the copper clapper caper was caught crashing. I could barely continue. I question their competence. Their career is now kaput.
I mean, it was truly lousy. Were they on crack?
I guess I’m an outlier, because I never hear good things about the movie, but it’s a favorite of mine. Ackroyd and Tom Hanks were absolutely perfect together.
I like (most of) the film Dragnet. Sure, it’s film based on an impersonation, so there’s not a lot of meat there, but they flesh it out fairly well. Getting Harry Morgan in there was a good coup. We watch it again every so often.
Thank god it’s Friday!
and get me a chili dog.
Only when on a case. Back at the station Harry Morgan’s dialogue was frequently extraneous, often about sandwiches.
Officer Bill Gannon: [Gannon pulls a sandwich out of his coat pocket] You want a bite?
Sgt. Joe Friday: No thanks.
Officer Bill Gannon: You sure?
Sgt. Joe Friday: Sure.
Officer Bill Gannon: [Gannon holds it up for Friday to see] Corned beef, imported Swiss, lettuce, Russian dressing, cole slaw, kosher pickle, slice of tomato, mayonnaise, peanut butter, horseradish, and a little hot mustard.
Sgt. Joe Friday: [Grimacing] No thanks.
Officer Bill Gannon: You’re sure now, it’s an awfully good sandwich.
Sgt. Joe Friday: Sounds like a seven course meal.
Officer Bill Gannon: Well, it is a little filling.
Also known as exposition. Most actors hate it. Humphrey Bogart famously said, “If I ever have to give exposition, I pray that in the back of the shot they have two camels fucking.”
…and a most excellent AI video prompt is put forth for the internet to run with.
He had me at Corned beef, imported Swiss, lettuce, Russian dressing, cole slaw, kosher pickle.
Remember the one, where he had a large fishing tackle box all loaded up for lunch?
Get back to us… 
Me too
I see Captain Queeg’s nervous testimony about the duplicate key to the wardroom in The Caine Mutiny.
I love Dragnet & Adam 12, the ridiculous delivery, the ham-fisted exposition, the preachy wrap-ups, the parade of Jack Webb familiar faces across the screen (there’s Burt Mustin! There’s Peggy Webber! There’s William Boyett before he was cast as “Mac” on Adam-12!), I love the fake hippies, the contrived Gannon dialogue, I love everything about it. Just a satisfying half hour of TV.
If there’s a very old guy on tv up to 1975 or so, odds are it’s Burt Mustin
Burt Mustin didn’t start acting in TV until he was 67. There’s still time for my acting career!
And don’t forget Virginia Gregg. Six Adam-12s, 6 Emergency!s, 10 OG Dragnets, and 14(!) Dragnets, and the pilot film. She was also in Webb’s film The DI.
She was a real “repeat offender”!
Virginia Gregg was a perennial in radio drama too - Dragnet, Gunsmoke, and many more.
It’s because of Burt Mustin I could answer a Jeopardy! clue Monday:
“Founded in Illinois in 1905, this labor union that wanted to form “one big union” was nicknamed the Wobblies.”
Burt Mustin was jawing with Reed and Malloy (season 5, ep 10) how he used to run the Wobblies out of town on a rail, just like they ought to do with those durn hippies and yippies and flippies.
(could be Mr Mustin on the sticker…)
I recently brought up that episode here as one of my all-time favorites. But I suspect that if the drowning story was true, it was a result of drunken partying, not well-dressed suburbanites lying around on the couch getting modestly high on marijuana.
Adam-12 took on the evil counterculture in a number of episodes where clean-cut young people were led astray by dope and pill fiends, and in one case Malloy and Reed bust a pair of burglars who were also Vietnam draft dodgers. 
Perhaps the episode’s writers had read John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (released just seven years prior), in which a lightly soused mother accidentally drowns her baby in the bathtub.
Whenever I watch the ending of “The Big High”, where Joe Friday walks towards the camera holding the bag of pot up to the camera as the theme plays, I imagine the lyrics:
“Marijuana
Marijuana bad”
Adam-12 once featured an old man (played by Burt Mustin) who was really down on “hippies” whether or not they’d done anything wrong, and got a polite lecture from Malloy and Reed.