| "The Story You Are About to Hear Is True": Dragnet, Transmedia Storytelling, and the Postwar Police Procedural" places the radio, television program, and feature film, Dragnet (19491959), at the intersection of cultural history and media history during the U.S. postwar period. The program, which follows two police detectives as they investigated crime, was drawn from real cases from the Los Angeles Police Department. By bringing audiences into police work with a new seriousness, Dragnet functioned artistically and ideologically as a pedagogical site for U.S. citizens. Heavily influenced by the program's collaboration with the LAPD, Dragnet presented an ideal of civic cooperation that responded to the increased faith in professionalized knowledge and organizational competence resulting from the successes of World War II.;This dissertation argues that Dragnet's place in postwar culture cannot be understood apart from its place in media history. The source of Dragnet's pedagogical effectiveness, as well as its popularity, was an aesthetically ambitious form of realism that crossed media platforms. By breaking the hackneyed conventions of crime drama, Dragnet reinvigorated radio drama (19491957). It then carried its prestige over to television (1951-1959), where it defined the terms of one of the new medium's most stable genres, the police procedural. In 1954, it became one of the first television shows to become a feature film. In addition to its contribution to postwar culture, Dragnet's fluid movement across media fills out the history of transmedia storytelling and convergence culture, making an important intervention in media studies.;Combining archival research and close textual analysis to see the full spectrum of Dragnet's cultural influence, this project contributes to a fuller understanding of how industrial practices shape civic knowledge and definitions of citizenship, a critical concern in an increasingly mediated age. |
