Dragnet — television’s first crime procedural — drew 16 million weekly viewers at its height in the mid-1950s, more than half the number of television-owning homes in America. Every week white suburbanites tuned in to watch Los Angeles Police Sergeant Joe Friday and his partner Frank Smith investigate back-alley muggings, missing children, dead housewives, and juvenile delinquents — against an urban backdrop that simultaneously repelled and attracted.

Jack Webb, the series creator, played Friday, a meticulous, no-nonsense detective who obeyed the rules and always got his man. By the time the show went off the air in 1959, most Americans could recite Friday’s catchphrase from memory: “Just the facts, ma’am.”

In 1954, Webb graced the cover of Time magazine. Praising the show, Time wrote that Americans have “gained a new appreciation of the underpaid, long-suffering ordinary policeman” and their “first rudimentary understanding of real-life law enforcement.”