Addicted to ‘Traffic’

The title “Traffic” elicits a Rorschach-like association, depending on how people have come to the tale of the unending war on drugs. For many film fans, “Traffic” evokes Steven Soderbergh’s Oscar-winning 2000 film, set in the atmosphere of the U.S.-Mexico drug war. To others, particularly those who prefer their narratives in longer form on smaller screens, it evokes the 1989 British miniseries titled “Traffik” that inspired the feature film and that offered a carefully threaded patchwork on the international heroin trade.

The people behind the newest incarnation of the project would like it if the title simply conjured a way of storytelling that examines a thorny moral issue from multiple viewpoints, providing thrills and drama but eschewing easy answers in uncovering the darkest aspects of our world.

Because after USA Network debuts its “Traffic” miniseries Monday night -- with new characters and situations, a new focus on drugs and immigrant smuggling now set in Afghanistan and Seattle, but still called “Traffic” -- it hopes viewers see a brand developing not terribly unlike, say, the small-screen franchise “Law & Order.” Like that show’s trademarked procedural swiftness and de-personalized law enforcers, “Traffic” might start to signify a kind of vice drama that’s intricate, controversial and ambiguous.

Stephen Hopkins, executive producer of the new version and director of the first two-hour segment, is already excited at the possibilities. “I hope there’s a lot more ‘Traffics,’ ” Hopkins says. “There are so many stories. It’s a perfect template for what the idea is, having the time and space to follow four or five different stories of different people, see how they’re all affected by this one idea or way of life, and then see how their lives intersect.”

It didn’t hurt that Simon Moore’s original teleplay was shaped by Hollywood into an Academy Award-winning moneymaker, either. Soderbergh’s film grossed $124 million in the U.S., after all, and became a buzzword in studio pitch sessions. “Every screenwriter will tell you that for a couple years after ‘Traffic,’ every time you went in for a meeting, the executive would say ‘I want a “Traffic”-type story, that multilayered narrative; three groups of people who apparently have no connection with each other,’ ” says Emmy-winning writer Ron Hutchinson, author of the new “Traffic.” “But the problem is they’re incredibly hard to write because there’s so much complexity. It’s probably the reason we haven’t seen a lot of [similar] movies.”

Since USA Films released Soderbergh’s “Traffic,” they quickly approached the movie’s producers -- Ed Zwick, Marshall Herskovitz and Laura Bickford -- to get involved in a series for the company’s cable network. Nothing came of those meetings, but when Jeff Wachtel became executive vice president of original programming at USA Network in 2001, he considered “Traffic” a priority in developing harder-edged material to augment successful mainstream series such as “Monk” and “The Dead Zone.” “A pre-branded name can be either an excuse or a challenge,” Wachtel says. “We didn’t want a pale imitation. We said, ‘If we don’t hear the right pitch, there’s no reason to do it.’ ”

Then Hutchinson bowled over executives with research that led him to a story out of Italy involving the murdered bodies of North African immigrants washing ashore in Sicily and how drugs instead of cash had become the currency that facilitated the illegal transportation of humans. When Hutchinson saw a news-based way to link such smuggling routes to terrorism, he was off and running. “I said, ‘We should look at the role heroin plays not just in keeping people addicted but as a way that clandestine groups perform their nefarious purposes on a global scale,’ ” Hutchinson recalls.

With narcotics now just a starting point, everyone felt a fresh set of interlocking stories -- eventually to include a risk-taking DEA agent in Afghanistan (Elias Koteas), the wife he’s left home (Mary McCormack), a Chechnyan cabby (Cliff Curtis) awaiting his wife and child’s perilous passage to America, and a young MBA grad (Balthazar Getty) in bed with the Chinese underworld -- could now be forged.

“It’s strange and nice for me,” Moore says by phone from London. “What’s the next incarnation? Perhaps a soda drink!”

The joke about “Traffic’s” popularity is fitting, since what prompted Moore to examine drugs so thoroughly in the first place was how they worked as a commodity, rather than as “a manifestation of evil.” He had seen how television smugly thought it had licked the issue, telling stories where diligent cops catching the right people made dope go away. “I wondered what it would be like if you looked at [drugs] like it was the car business, quite dispassionately,” Moore says. “What happens if you start a series with the big drug bust that people always end series with, and then spend the next six months showing how the route is put back together?”

The Eastern and Western story lines in Moore’s “Traffik,” directed by Alistair Reid, chronicled a dance of desperation: the beset Pakistani opium farmer (Jamal Shah) pressured to switch to a less profitable crop, then opting to make more money by working for a big drug dealer; the clueless wife (Lindsay Duncan) of a wealthy German trafficker thrust into her husband’s criminal affairs; and the British anti-drug politician (Bill Paterson) torn by his own daughter’s heroin addiction.

Moore remembers the hesitant press reaction to the first night his “Traffik” aired on Britain’s Channel Four. There was the newspaper that alerted viewers that that would be a better time to do the ironing instead; that same paper years later called it “landmark television.” “It wasn’t by any means an instant success,” Moore says, “but it was repeated quite quickly, and I think what worked for it was that the people who liked it really talked about it. People have great loyalty to it. Some people were irritated by the fact that it didn’t seem to offer solutions, whereas others, that was the best thing about it.”

Ten years later, Soderbergh had the rights to “Traffik” and hooked up with screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, who had been researching a black comedy on the drug war for Zwick and Herskovitz. The movie “Traffic” would be serious but also mordantly witty and, in a fleet bit of cinematographic flair, each story thread was given a defining color scheme: blue for Michael Douglas’ beleaguered drug czar in Ohio; glossy hues for Catherine Zeta-Jones’ San Diego-based drug dealer’s wife; and sun-scorched yellow for Benicio Del Toro’s Mexican cop flirting with corruption. There was no longer a character like Moore’s strapped farmer, but the emphasis on moral relativity hewed to the original’s worldview.

Although he didn’t get involved with a new television version of “Traffic,” Herskovitz was supportive of new manifestations. “I think people responded to the honesty of the film,” says Herskovitz, who like Moore hadn’t seen the new miniseries. “I thought it was valid to try to continue that on television. It’s important, though, that an ethical pedigree is maintained. I hope it furthers that sense of what the movie meant.”

Moore, who has quibbles about Soderbergh’s film but nonetheless calls it a “tremendous” addition to the public debate, still can’t help but point out the irony in so successful a critical assessment of the drug war ultimately having no effect. “When the film came out I read articles saying, ‘This is a radical rethinking of the drug thing,’ and I thought, ‘That’s great, but I wrote the series 12 years before the film, and nothing’s happened.’ Now, as a result of the military activity in Afghanistan, the heroin crop has shot up.”

“If indeed there has been a war on drugs, we’ve surely lost it,” Moore says.

The new “Traffic” may play more like a “24”-style thriller than the previous incarnations, but it unfolds in a murky world of illegal immigration, weapons, porous borders and freewheeling law enforcers that can’t help but resonate with a post-9/11 viewership. Does “Traffic” have a better chance playing over days in living rooms rather than in two hours in multiplexes? Shows with knotty story lines such as “The Sopranos” are regularly hailed as deeper, richer, almost novelistic entertainments than anything the movie studios produce.

“The more time you have, the less judgmental you have to be,” says Hopkins, who previously directed the acclaimed first season of Fox’s terrorism thriller “24,” generally touted as a movie disguised in episodic series garb. “You don’t have to have goodies and baddies. It’s done a big flip-around since I was a kid, where the ‘70s cinema was so gritty and tough and real, and now most of the cinemas really have movies for kids. I don’t think grown-ups get a chance to get fed very well.”

Adds Wachtel, “I’m a TV chauvinist. I just think it’s where the best storytelling in our culture has been.” The “Traffic” template might enable USA Network to join the HBO-level club of quality television. “It’s a seductive way into a very difficult subject matter. The story lines are resolved, but the theme is not.”

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‘Traffic’

When: 9-11 p.m. Monday-Wednesday

Where: USA

Cast: Elias Koteas, Mary McCormack, Cliff Curtis, Martin Donovan, Balthazar Getty

Production credits: Executive producer-writer, Ron Hutchinson. Directors Stephen Hopkins, Eric Bross.