The Bookie

There is a back story to this episode that makes it a lot more interesting. This episode stars Bobby Troup as a rather pitiful small-time criminal and the show was a great showcase for him as an actor. Now here's the interesting aspect. Jack Webb (Sgt. Friday and the show's guiding force) was married to Julie London. After they divorced, London married Troup. Yet Webb apparently harbored no grudge towards Troup. On the contrary, he was given several chances to appear on "Dragnet" and was even given a regular job working on "Emergency" was one of the doctors. As I said, an interesting back story.

The episode begins with Friday and Gannon attending an interdenominational prayer breakfast for a police fraternity. Afterwords, Friday is given a special assignment with the police chaplain who did the benediction at the breakfast. According to the story, Gannon was too well-known in this part of LA and this might jeopardize his cover.

Friday and his new partner have heard that a bartender named Clinger (Troup) is the contact person for people wanting to do some illegal gambling. They do an undercover investigation and cozy up to Clinger--hoping they'll get him to place bets for them.

In an unusual bit of comic relief, Sidney Miller appears in the bar at the end of one evening. He sits down with Joe and does one of the funniest drunk routines I've seen. He was awfully funny and I didn't mind this bit of padding in the show.

Later, Friday finds out that Clinger has a young daughter who is sick with a severe heart defect. His wife is dead and you get the impression he's a very nice guy despite being the contact man for the gamblers. The show did a good job of building sympathy for the hard-luck guy.

I won't go into what happens next--you can see it yourself. But I gotta admit that this is one of the only episode of "Dragnet" that really hit me emotionally. Though I've seen the episode several times, when I just watched it again it had me tearing up by the end. A very good episode and one that takes a lot of emotional risk. One of the better written episodes, even if the story is very, very simple.

This was an odd episode; the first one I felt sorry for the "crook." You couldn't help but feel that way. He was a bartender who helped run a bookmaking scheme. He didn't do much, just hand out phone numbers on where to call or took the bet, like a runner for the numbers racket. He did it to help pay for his daughter's open-heart operation. His 10-year-old kid had a bad heart. It sounds corny, but these are true stories. Of course, the guy gets caught but it turns out he also was wanted in Pennsylvania for a forgery. There was justice, as his charge in L.A. was dismissed but he was extradited.

Another unusual aspect of this case was that Friday had a new partner. Since Gannon was too well-known in the North Hollywood area to go undercover, the L.A. police chaplain, "Sgt. Bill Riddle," worked with Joe. William Reynolds played that part.

Gannon (Harry Morgan, who is excellent in this role and is getting funnier with each episode) is happy. He thinks the chaplain might be a good influence on Joe because he says "I always knew one thing about you."

"How's that?" asks Friday.

"You're a heathen."

This one's just strange. In Jack Webb's alter ego Joe Friday's world there's no gray areas. Everything's either black or white. This episode's an exception: there's sympathy for the bad guy. Weirder still is the fact that the bad guy's Bobby Troup, who was far-more-happily-married to Webb's ex-wife Julie London (the couple would pair up in Webb's hit series Emergency! four seasons later). It's interesting to note that that Webb/Friday never would show a sympathetic doper or unrepentant hippie (there was one episode where hippie scum Gary Crosby got a haircut after realizing the error in his lifestyle), so the criminal had to be involved in the relatively innocuous activity of bookmaking. Also, gaze in awe here of Friday's smooth pick up lines. He thrives on rejection. Very, very strange stuff.