Jack Webb had a lot of help when he created the hit series Dragnet. The series marked a significant departure from existing models of “crime and punishment” police and detective shows – which had, in the past, existed only in exaggerated versions. With Dragnet, the quotidian, everyday aspects of police work came to the fore, portrayed in minute detail. But the origins of Dragnet are shrouded in a good deal of contentious disputation and it's clear that series creator, Jack Webb, was not the only person involved in establishing the format for the show. Born in Santa Monica, CA, on 2 April 1920, Webb never knew his father, Samuel Webb, who deserted Jack's mother and filed for divorce shortly before Jack's birth (Hayde 2001, 9). Samuel Webb then vanished completely from Jack's life – swallowed up by the Depression – leaving Jack, his mother, Margaret, and her mother, Emma, to get by as best they could (Hayde 2001, 9–10).

As a child, Jack Webb was plagued by a variety of debilitating illnesses and thus forced to spend many hours in bed. There, he compensated for his incapacity by becoming an omnivorous reader of books borrowed from the public library or magazines scavenged from trash cans outside the family's cramped apartment (Hayde 2001, 10). Indeed, Webb was so ill during his childhood that he was unable to walk up a flight of stairs and had to be carried up by his mother; he didn't start attending school until he was nine years old, simply because his health was so precarious (Hayde 2001, 10). After graduating from Belmont High School – where he put on variety shows and got his first exposure to the technical aspects of radio production – Webb tried his hand at standup comedy, amazingly enough. Later, he worked as a disc jockey on The Coffee Club, assembling a voluminous record collection in the process, as well as creating and starring in a now-forgotten series entitled One Out of Seven, which was written by future Dragnet co-creator Jim Moser, whom Webb met while working as a staff announcer at radio station KGO, San Francisco (Hayde 2001, 11–12).