Burglary: DR-31

Actor (one Timothy Donnelly) makes your skin crawl just to watch him. Out of shape, flabby, silly mustache, creepy eyes he is the epitome of embarrassment and symbolizes all those grown men, collectors of dumb comics, who figuratively wear their underwear on the outside of their pants. (Well, he does it literally!) I don't know if the part was that badly acted but there's just a disturbing and uncomfortable feeling of being embarrassed for this guy, and I do mean the actor for taking such a dumb role or playing it so stupidly.

I'd bet this kid never acted again, never heard of him before or since. Judging by his meager filmography, I wasn't wrong. I'd have thought this would be the only role at his page, though. Not sure what Jack Webb was thinking in hiring someone as unsightly as him to be on TV. This was an era when beautiful people played "ugly".

Many scenes were unintentionally funny. That creepy and cringeworhty moment when he cries all over his poster, LOL! Looks like the actor was as much a failure as this, his signature role, no doubt. Oh well. Glad I don't have to watch him in anything else!

This is a hilarious but somewhat sad episode. Tim Donelly plays a misfit that has retreated into a world of fantasy. Sad and quite believable.

I overall hated this episode, but found something quite good in it. Tim Donnelly gave a moving performance. What I found incredible is the lack of empathy from Friday and Cannon. Shaking their heads and glances at one another while Donnelly described the cruelty he had endured was hard to watch.

Someone is stealing comic books, posters and other items featuring comic book heroes. When Friday and Gannon finally catch up with the thief, they are in for a tragic confrontation. A well written script and great acting by "the bad guy".

Here's proof that young people worshiping comic book movies is nothing new: from one of the silliest yet entertaining episodes of the 1950's-born DRAGNET rebooted into the late-1960's... titled DRAGNET 1968: BULGLARY: DR-31 where Jack Webb's Joe Friday and Harry Morgan as partner Bill Gannon traipse from one movie theater to another, investigating stolen or looted movie posters and lobby cards advertising a brand new comic book adaptation...

Turns out being the most bizarre and surreal of the show's villains in a pudgy, mustached, monotone twenty-something donning a cape and costume, deeming himself The Crimson Crusader played by a frumpy, almost non-acting Tim Donnelly who, in one soft-interrogation sequence, provides a dirge-like, melancholy monologue about being fat and bullied in school, and how this drove him headlong into a fantastical world to find a safe place within it... thus making this eclectic fan-favorite episode all his own.