Who knows? (see the Wacky sticker card) But it rhymes!
I always loved the initial episode of the '60s Dragnet (“The LSD Story”), particularly when Joe Friday tries to speak in teen slang to Blue Boy (“You’re pretty high and far out; what kind of kick are you on?”). The acid test party that he and Gannon break up later in that episode is unintentionally hilarious.
Michael Burns, who played Blue Boy in that episode, was also in another episode where he played a teen delinquent who stole cars and joyrode. At the end of the episode, he and his buddies raid a party, he steals one of the homeowner’s shotguns and then blows a guy’s head off in cold blood. Definitely a big swerve in the third act!
One of my favorite lines with one of my favorite actresses, Jill Banner. Probably as close as he could get to a risque insult.
Webb was one of those actors who, no matter the role or the script, was simply playing himself. Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, and William Shatner were / are similar in that regard.
That also infected his writing and directing. A lot!
Sounds like Rod Serling. When he’s get behind in scripts, all of a sudden. every character in the TZ episode talked like… Rod Serling!
That one is on on MeTV right now as I type this.
That music cue really sells it
If Jack Webb wasn’t a fascist, he could have been the greatest Beat poet of his time.
The Beat aura on Pat Novak For Hire (a pre-Dragnet radio show starring Jack Webb) was so thick, you could cut it up with a hacksaw and feed the neighborhood for months.
“I watched her as she turned and walked out the door. She was wearing a flowered print dress, and as she walked, the roses kept getting mixed up with the daisies. She walked with a nice friendly movement, like the trap door on a gallows.”
“There’s nothing in nature so sad as a half-empty bottle. It’s like a broken vow or an unfulfilled promise in the sky, a falling star almost. A falling star and you shrug it off, never realizing that a whole world has ended at that moment. A hundred millions dreams, maybe, and you watch it fall and make an asinine wish, that’s all the good it does a star to fall. It gives some kid a chance to wish for a bicycle.”
“She’d been traded around more than a Red Sox pitcher.”
I’ve been wondering what Jack Webb/Joe Friday would think about marijuana being legal in one form or another in most of the U.S..
I…I don’t think he quite grasped the nature of a falling/shooting star. Unless he’s Horton.
Who’s Horton?
I read that one of the ways they kept production costs down on the series was having Morgan and Webb wearing the same clothing in pretty much every episode. There are a few episodes where they have something a bit more leisurely on, but for the most part they’re just wearing the same suit each episode.
He had a small role as a kind of beatnik aspiring director in Sunset Boulevard.
Webb looked so young in that role. Wiki informs me he was 30. Color me surprised; I’d have WAGged it more like 25.
Johnny Carson occasionally mentioned that Jack Webb was a big fan of jazz music, and had a huge collection of jazz records and an amazing stereo system in his basement to listen to them.
Not to mention Norman Bates’ mother.
They could move to Indiana. 
But the Peanut butter???
He wasnt. Rather right wing for Hollywood, sure.
I remember on Blue Bloods, The Commissioner (Frank Reagan/Tom Selleck) when the Mayor or someone wanted him to stop arresting people for marijuana , he said “It’s the Law. Change the Law, and that’s fine, but dont tell me and 30000 cops to not enforce the law” (or words to that effect).
Cops have done selective policing of laws since cops were invented. The only thing that has changed in two centuries has been which laws were strictly enforced for some people and weakly enforced for others.
True, but generally not on a Big City level, unless ordered to by some Politician,