Trafficking delivers facts more than drama
Barry Garron

LOS ANGELES—“Human Trafficking,” Lifetime’s first miniseries, is steeped in the network’s tradition of blending programming with social or medical issues. As the title states, it is a story about the terrible criminal enterprise in which women and children are lured or outright abducted into forced servitude. Although the servitude takes several forms in the real world, including domestic labour, the miniseries concentrates exclusively on sexual slavery.
“Human Trafficking” is nothing if not thorough in its depiction of the various ways in which people become commodities. Some are lured with false promises by suitors who become recruiters. Some are sold by their impoverished families, and others are whisked away, literally kicking and screaming. One way or another, many are smuggled into the U.S., where they are forced into prostitution and threatened with death if they attempt to escape. It is a grim, appalling business, and “Human Trafficking” leaves no element of it unexposed.
Perhaps inevitably, with all that focus on the educational component, the story gets short shrift. For the most part, there is no more character development here than in, say, the average police procedural. At the same time, given the level of special effects to which viewers of crime dramas have become accustomed, the cinematography here seems restrained and prosaic by comparison.