The Big High

* Indeed I learned a valuable lesson from this episode. Decades later when my wife became pregnant we immediately became good sober citizens refraining from both drugs and alcoholic drinks and responsible parents.

... that message being the rocky path drug addiction can take you down and the impact it has on the family of the addict, the children in particular. But it conflates marijuana use with heroin addiction, presuming that because most people at B (hard drugs) start at A (weed), then everybody at A ends up at B. There wouldn't be a functional millennial around if that was true.

A middle aged man comes to the police station, alarmed about the welfare of his grandchild because his daughter and her husband are smoking weed (not the term he uses). Detectives Friday and Gannon investigate.

They find the child well fed, clean, and cared for and the house in good order. But the young husband has obviously never heard of "discretion is the better part of valor", especially when dealing with the police who can make your life miserable. He tells the police they should stop wasting time with small things like marijuana use and go after the real criminals, and that even if he does smoke joints now and then, the police will never catch him at it. He has just given Friday and Gannon a benchmark for achievement. The young man is prescient in the future he lays out, but not even he could imagine that in the California of 50 years later that Friday would be more likely to be arrested for smoking those cigarettes of his than the young man would be for smoking weed.

The acting and writing in this episode are pretty good in spite of the fact that it is a time capsule, or maybe that is part of its charm if you like to view history through the films and TV of the time, but today the thing you would have to be on drugs to believe is that a couple in their early 20s could afford to own their own home in Sherman Oaks on one salary and without generational wealth.

The copaganda behind "The Big High" is clever and deceptive and works right up until the craven, shrieking melodrama at the conclusion destroys what credibility this marijuana jeremiad had established with such fabricated contrivance that you would be within your rights to challenge just how true these "true" stories we're always about to see really are.

Don't blame David Vowell, whose agile script displays his usual attention to detail and fashions some stirring speeches for the guest characters even if the smug or overwrought ones sound like sophistry. As always, the culprit must be Jack Webb, the driving force behind "Dragnet" whose jaw is never clenched tighter, whose tone is never more acidic, whose eyes are never narrowed more by self-righteous contempt and disgust than when he's railing about illegal drugs.

After the comedic opening with Officer Bill Gannon regaling Sergeant Joe Friday about his secret special barbecue sauce, they are called into listen to Charles Porter's (Ed Prentiss) lament: Distraught over the welfare of his toddler granddaughter because his daughter Jean (Brenda Scott) and her husband Paul Shipley (Tim Donnelly) smoke marijuana, he is now threatening a custody lawsuit citing child endangerment to protect--cue the hankie--what may turn out to be his only grandchild ever. Oh, and here's the kicker: Apart from asking directions, Porter has never spoken to a policeman until now.

Well, when you're an old, white, presumably comfortably well-off man (money for lawsuits doesn't grow on trees), you get to speak with Captain Trembly (Robert Knapp) about your complaint, with Trembly dispatching Friday and Gannon, merely on your say-so (Aren't there any corroborating witnesses? Was he even asked about that?), out to Sherman Oaks to investigate.

Off they go to a "quiet street in a well-to-do neighborhood" to speak first with Jean, Phi Beta Kappa at college, where she graduated magna cum laude in English literature and proves it by quoting Coleridge and Bible scripture in her smug, self-serving rationale, then with Paul, pugnacious and declamatory, a computer programmer and military veteran home from a tough day at the office (had he poured himself a martini instead of wanting to light up a joint, would that have been acceptable behavior?) whose superior tone about the future legality of marijuana is like waving a red cape before a bull named Friday, who lashes out at both parents of Robin, sitting quietly in her crib as the symbol of the upstanding American family, with his patented gateway drug theory that sees only illegal drugs as the stepping stones to the harder stuff.

Let's not forget that two of LA's finest approached the Shipley home with the presumption of guilt, insisted on entering the premises without a warrant, and tried to search the premises without one as well. Call that foreshadowing because, just as Lyn Murray's incidental music shrieks to punctuate Webb's testy ripostes to the glib liberalism of the Shipleys, it will positively scream at the completely contrived, over-the-top melodramatic climax.

That begins when, two months later, a drug addict (James Oliver) who just happened to be at a pot party at the Shipleys is brought into the detectives' room where Friday and Gannon just happen to be. The addict coughs up the requisite information, sending the Dragnamic Duo high-tailing it back to Sherman Oaks to bust the high-flying, highfalutin, privileged suburbanites and reveal a tragedy so horrific that Gannon has to run outside to throw up as Friday crushes a baggie of marijuana--"pot, grass, weed, reefer, Mary Jane, whatever you want to call it, Mister, it's all the gateway to hell"--in his enraged fists.

No, Friday didn't say any of that. He didn't need to. It's already baked into this "Reefer Madness" redux, a melodrama so lugubrious that you literally don't know whether to laugh or cry.

One bright spot is Merry Anders as Policewoman Dorothy Miller, working out of Juvenile, who, when asked by Friday and Gannon if she could look into the Shipley case for possible child endangerment, gets an effective spotlight with her stump speech about another family in danger, this one a working-class family with child abuse from a violent father and mother who will accede to it because she feels trapped. Anders's convincing delivery elicits more empathy than the ultimately ham-fisted morality play that forms the core of "The Big High."

REVIEWER'S NOTE: What makes a review "helpful"? Every reader of course decides that for themselves. For me, a review is helpful if it explains why the reviewer liked or disliked the work or why they thought it was good or not good. Whether I agree with the reviewer's conclusion is irrelevant. "Helpful" reviews tell me how and why the reviewer came to their conclusion, not what that conclusion may be. Differences of opinion are inevitable. I don't need "confirmation bias" for my own conclusions. Do you?

Joe Friday gives one of his best speeches in the history of Dragnet ! Laying out to suburban druggies that no one becomes a drug addict without first starting out on Mary-Jane - seems all innocent at first but then you wake up one morning and all you can think of is how to get your next fix - not a pretty life.

Kudos to the writer for predicting the gradual legalization of Marijuana.

Once again Dragnet predicts the sad future that America has descended

into and sadly seems determined

to descend even deeper into the abyss.

Wow, what a dramatic episode...at least the end, which I don't want to give away.

What this episode is, basically, is the argument for-and-against marijuana use. A young, Yuppie couple in Sherman Oaks gives the pro side, "Joe Friday" (Jack Webb) gives the con. You listen; you decide.

What was interesting, besides the good acting and dialog on both sides, was how the episode shows its age. A "lid" costs $15, explains Friday. Wow, it's probably $200-$300 today. Friday says it is "heaven for those who sell it and hell for those who use it." Hmmm, I would gather that's a bit overstated and not true, but what do I know? Heck, here it is 40 years later and California had a vote recently to legalize (which failed).

In addition to the drug story, we see Bill Gannon explain his new barbecue sauce that if he put on the market, he says, he could retire because it's so good and would be so popular. He goes through all the ingredients, including the secret one, and poor Friday just listens and says, "Uh, uh....is that right...okay," etc. Poor Joe always puts up with so much b.s. from his partner, but it's almost always funny! Harry Morgan is just great, as he was less than a decade later in "Mash."