Detectives Jimmy McCarron (Desmond Harrington) and Frank Smith (Ethan Embry), ABC’s L.A. Dragnet

I love Desmond Harrington as Miami cop Joey Quinn on Dexter, but he’s always going to be the hot-tempered Jimmy McCarron on ABC’s remake of Dragnet to me. On paper, the character was as stereotypical as they come: a young, handsome detective with a very short fuse. In the entire series, he was so ill defined that he got only three facts of backstory (I counted) and even wore the same outfit quite a few times over. What made him memorable was Harrington’s performance; when he was called upon to fly off the rails, he really did, and there was always much more going on behind his eyes than was ever written on the page. In a cast made up of basically interchangeable parts, McCarron was the one character who stood out.

There wouldn’t have been a McCarron, though, if there hadn’t been Frank Smith. In the remake’s first season, when it was called Dragnet and actually respected the title, Ethan Embry played the young partner to Joe Friday (a surprisingly great Ed O’Neill). He was pretty memorable; the writers had a bit of fun playing the contrast between the two characters, with Frank’s technological savvy and youth coming in handy to show up or confound his older partner on a few occasions. Beyond that, though, Frank wore his heart on his sleeve and paid for it (such as in my favorite episode, “The Cutting of the Swath,” where he finds a young murder victim disposed of in a cardboard box). He might look cute, and he wasn’t seasoned yet, but Frank was a darn good cop and the show never let us forget that.

It’s a shame – and a travesty – that what was actually a pretty good remake was obliterated when, after the first season, Embry was written out along with actress Lindsay Crouse, O’Neill was promoted, and the focus shifted to a bunch of younger and not at all well fleshed out characters. Still, I’ll always love the first season, and I admit that I can’t quite write off season two, because at least it gave me the character of McCarron.

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