Kidnap Dramas Collide With Life

The small blond girl peeks out from her upstairs bedroom, anxious about the clamor downstairs where her parents are hosting a boisterous party populated with swingers. Soon after she retreats to her bed, her door slowly opens, and she gazes at a stranger. Hours later, police are investigating her disappearance.

The little girl is not Danielle Van Dam, the 7-year-old girl kidnapped from her San Diego home and murdered in a nationally watched case that culminated this week in the conviction of her neighbor, David Westerfield.

The youngster in this situation is actress Jenna Boyd, and the scene is from CBS’ hit “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.” And the “investigator” looking for her is David Caruso, the star of the new spinoff “CSI: Miami.” The episode aired in May and will repeat Sept. 16, leading into the premiere of the new drama.

In a notable collision of fiction and fact, a number of new and returning dramatic TV shows are showcasing kidnappings as a major theme at a time when news broadcasts are dominated by the Van Dam case, the recent snatching of 4-year-old Jessica Cortez from Echo Park, the kidnapping and slaying of 5-year-old Samantha Runnion and the abduction and rape of Lancaster teens Tamara Brooks and Jacqueline Marris. TV watchers would be excused for assuming this is simply another example of Hollywood seeking ratings by exploiting other people’s misfortunes. But what may be most surprising about the dramatic intersection of news and entertainment is that it’s largely coincidental.

Indeed, kidnapping has been a perennial dramatic theme, a reliable narrative device on just about every police series. What’s different about the current flow of abduction-themed shows is their presence amid the even larger flood of news reports about children in peril. So while the evening dramas may have been conceived in the relative solitude of writers’ minds, they hit close to home by so closely overlapping the nightly news.

UPN’s new supernatural drama “Haunted” is one of the shows showcasing kidnappings. In the first episode of that series, which will premiere next month, anguished parents confront a private investigator searching for their son, who has been kidnapped by a vicious criminal.

Far from drawing scorn from advocacy groups, the abduction-themed programs are largely getting a thumbs-up from those on the front lines. Advocates for the families of kidnapped children may object to the easy resolutions that mark television programs, but otherwise seem to welcome the attention the issue is getting from network programmers.

Still, some producers have been shaken by the sudden and unexpected relevance of their projects.

When Emile Levisetti, one of the executive producers for “Haunted,” was helping to develop the first episode, the missing child plot was merely a dramatic device designed to introduce the main characters and theme of the show.

“I’ve been living with this story on ‘Haunted’ for more than a year,” Levisetti said. “But this July, I could see that things were beginning to change. Now people may watch it with a little more gravity.

”....If we were selling our show now,” Levisetti said. “I don’t know if this is the story we would have chosen. But we don’t have any regrets. We will not be having any other missing children in our upcoming episodes.”

“We are acutely aware of the sensitivity surrounding kidnappings,” said Howard Gordon, one of the executive producers of Fox’s “24.” “It’s occupying the whole world we’re living in now. We’re not exploiting it. But we’re not writing away from it, either.”

Gordon said the correlation between fictional kidnappings and the coverage of high-profile kidnappings resembles concerns in Hollywood following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. “24” was just one of the television and film projects that altered or eliminated plot elements that veered too close to details about the bombings. A depiction of a plane exploding was edited out of the series’ first episode.

In addition to “CSI: Miami,” “Haunted” and “24,” other recent or upcoming shows dealing with the kidnapping of youths include:

* The July 28 episode of NBC’s reality legal drama “Crime and Punishment,” which featured the trial of a man accused of kidnapping, attempted murder and child abuse when a 12-year-old girl is found tied up in his apartment.

* The pilot of FX’s critically acclaimed police drama “The Shield,” in which a young girl was taken by her drug-addicted father and sold to a child molester, who keeps her locked up in the basement of an abandoned house.

* The pilot of CBS’ new fall drama “Without a Trace,” about the FBI’s Missing Persons Squad, centering on a young career woman held against her will by a co-worker.

* “Hack,” an upcoming CBS drama starring David Morse as an ex-cop-turned-taxi-driver who seeks to redeem his troubled past by helping others. In the pilot episode, one of his fares--a tearful father (Conor O’Farrell)--asks the cabbie to locate his missing teenage daughter, who had been corresponding via the Internet with an unknown man. It turns out the man is holding the girl prisoner.

Thomas Carter, an executive producer on “Hack,” said that the torment the father feels about his daughter’s disappearance coincides with the trauma experienced by the families of kidnapped children.

“We see a father who does not know where his child is, and the anguish of that,” Carter said. “This is a very human reaction, a real dealing with emotional distress.”

For all of these fictional projects on episodic shows, there have thus far been no TV movie projects announced that would dramatize this summer’s kidnap tales, along the lines of the Emmy-nominated 1989 film “I Know My First Name Is Steven”; the drama was based on the case of Steven Stayner, who was abducted at age 7 and sexually abused for seven years before escaping. Of this summer’s photogenic news, the tale of trapped miners more quickly drew the attention of the TV movie producers.

For now, law enforcement officials are unconcerned about TV’s spate of kidnapping shows, saying there is no indication that the shows are exploiting tragedies or sparking copycats.

“The whole issue of youth abductions has been a closet issue on some levels; Hollywood does not always represent this problem accurately,” said Georgia Hilgeman-Hammond, executive director and founder of the Vanished Children’s Alliance, one of the country’s oldest missing children’s foundations.

“But a lot of people do learn about this through television shows. It’s the responsibility of the producers to try and depict this problem as realistically as possible.”

Kidnapping experts also point out that despite the high profiles of the cases, the number of kidnappings of young people is actually down from previous years.

“Abductions of children by strangers is one of the rarest crimes,” said Jenni Thompson, director of public affairs for the Polly Klaas Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on missing and abducted children, named after the 12-year-old Petaluma girl abducted from her home at knifepoint and murdered. “Of all the crimes against children in general--murder, rape, sexual abuse--less than 1% of all missing children are kidnapped by strangers.”

Still, Thompson added, “all this media coverage has made this even more of a scary reality.”

While the anguish of families or survivors of lost children may be aggravated by such fictional fare--which almost always concludes with the safe recovery of the victims and a happy ending--law enforcement experts and leaders of several advocacy organizations specializing in missing children see some value in the current stream of fictional dramas, even though they say the situations are often less than authentic.

“The more people see these kinds of shows, the more they may realize that these kinds of things can happen, and they can do something about it,” said Randy Aden, a supervising special agent with the FBI.

Stories of abductions--whether rooted in reality or told from a more fantastical perspective--are a regular plot line in network TV. Hart Hanson, an executive producer of CBS’ “Judging Amy,” which has explored child kidnappings from a legal and societal perspective, said the aspects of abductions “have all the hallmarks of good drama. There’s the ticking clock, the high stakes, the emotions. It’s good for bombs going off, which isn’t our show at all.”

In almost every instance, the child is located alive and basically unharmed, “which may often not be the result in reality,” said Hilgeman-Hammond.

Adam Morena, a case manager with Child Quest International, an organization devoted to the protection and recovery of missing, abused and exploited children, said that families dealing with lost children find that the fictional story lines often trivialize the real-life trauma of the situation.

“For these people, it’s a daily way of life, and we’d like to see some of these producers show more responsibility rather than displaying this false sense of security,” Morena said. “When a child is found on television, it’s like everyone is ecstatic, it’s one for the good guys, everyone is happy, when in fact the probability of that happening is low.”

Though the abductions on “24” may have disturbed some viewers, Gordon said their predicament was essential for the story.

“We wanted this show to be a mirror of society,” he said. “People who want a ‘blue sky’ show perhaps should not watch us. We’re not afraid of the unhappy ending. Lots of bad things happen. It’s sort of our theme. These are scary times and the world is a scary place.”

“24,” at times targeted by critics as being too melodramatic in having Kim in constant peril from abductors, will deal directly with the aftermath of her ordeal.

“The whole gist of this season will revolve around Kim and Jack dealing with this,” Gordon said “The story will be informed very heavily by her abduction. She will be put in a position where she can help someone.”

The Polly Klaas Foundation’s Thompson said she did not feel the TV dramas were being exploitative, and hoped that the shows will spark more public dialogue about abductions.

“It’s a crime people really need to understand, and maybe a TV show will get them to talk and think about it,” she said. “Maybe it will push them to a place where they will take action. It’s a positive step.”