Dragnet vs. Highway Patrol. Discuss.

Highway Patrol episodes were almost all action, and it happened quite often that the bad guy would die in a shootout with Dan Mathews and his men. Dragnet episodes were almost all talk and there were only a few gunshots on the 1967-70 series (more in the 1950s B&W "Dragnet.")

The B&W Dragnet still included minutes of banter between Joe and his partner; in general, the episodes included a lot of of talk. Dragnet is focused on the police and never shows the criminals without the police being present. In Highway Patrol we see the action by the criminals as they commit their crimes and not merely at the end when they are apprehended, as is usually the case on Dragnet.

I suspect the difference follows in part from Dragnet originating as a radio series. There is not much point in including a lot of action that the audience can't see in a radio episode. Most of the early episodes of TV Dragnet were reenactments of radio episodes that honestly didn't make very good use of the visual medium. Even after the series was no longer simulcast on radio, the episodes were still being written in a radio vein. Highway Patrol did not have this limitation.