[Today’s run: 2 miles with the dog]
We watched some more Adam-12 re-runs this evening. Adam-12 is a police show that started on the air in 1968. It was a spin-off from Dragnet and was known for being “realistic”, using real incidents from the the Los Angeles police department logs.
Here’s a list of things they don’t have on Adam-12:
- No ambulances; they have something kind of similar but it is just for transportation, and the people who drive it are dressed as policemen.
- Not much in the way of an emergency room at the hospital
- No paramedics
- No CPR
- No SWAT teams (I think that kind of thing is kind of out of style again these days.)
- They had car radios but no hand-held radios. So once they left the car they were out of touch
- No computers, cell phones, GPS
- No video camera rolling in the car
- No divider between the front and back seats of the car
- No seat belts
- No plastic-zip handcuffs
- No 911 (I guess you had to look up the number for the police department?)
- No helicopters
- No night vision goggles
- No mag-lights or laser sights
- No air conditioning in the patrol cars
- No tasers, no mace or pepper spray either
- A very abbreviated “miranda” warning
- Very little “crime scene” evidence stuff of any kind, just a bit of mention of fingerprinting
- They do have a breath-a-lyzer that they used on the drunks
Some of that is because of the style of the show. They used studio back-lots and low-budget sets and production. But some is because in 1968 such things didn’t exist.
After Adam-12 came on, a few years later there was a spin-off of that called Emergency! which was about firemen/paramedics. It kind of introduced that idea to the world And it was more “realistic”. Later I think there was a show about S.W.A.T. (Special Weapons And Tactics) teams where guys did things like training to clear houses and use sniper rifles and stuff.