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Video: "LADIES and gentlemen, the United States is one of the largest markets for sex slavery in the entire world. We need to realize that modern-day slavery is only occurring because we choose to ignore it."
If these words sound more like lines from a political address than dialogue from a made-for-television movie, that may be because they were inspired by a speech that Tony Blair gave in 2003. It got Trevor Walton - a senior vice president at Lifetime, who was in London at the time - thinking, and the result is "Human Trafficking," the channel's first mini-series. Starring Mira Sorvino as the sexy-but-determined government agent who delivers those words, it is scheduled to be broadcast on Oct. 24 and Oct. 25 at 9 p.m. "The biggest percentage of people that are trafficked in the world are women, and women are our business at Lifetime," Mr. Walton said in an interview.
Lifetime has been unquestionably successful in that business: it is the No. 1 cable channel among female viewers. Since its debut in 1984, it has offered women the television equivalent of comfort food. Its programs - the soft-focus "Intimate Portrait" biographies of everyone from Kelly Ripa to Bella Abzug, reruns of "Designing Women" and "Golden Girls," and movies in which, more often than not, someone is stalking Shannen Doherty or Jaclyn Smith - provide a warm, consistent hum.
In recent years, however, Lifetime has promoted its issue-oriented programming by tying it to direct appeals to viewers to improve their lives. In April, for instance, after the broadcast of "Terror at Home," a documentary about domestic abuse, the National Domestic Violence Hotline had a 7,000 percent increase in calls.
But Lifetime's most surprising experiment has taken place off screen. Through its public affairs office, it has become a political lobbying force - and quite an effective one at that - rallying its audience to back laws about a broad slate of women's issues.
The Justice for All Act of 2004, for example, which sought to speed the DNA testing of rape kits, wasn't getting a lot of attention on its own. ("I had many a press conference," said Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney, a Democrat from New York who sponsored the act, "and the only press in the audience was Lifetime TV.") So Lifetime collected 110,000 signatures. President Bush signed the bill into law last year.
And after broadcasting "Video Voyeur: The Susan Wilson Story," a movie in which Angie Harmon was spied on by a creepy, high-tech neighbor, Lifetime brought Ms. Harmon to Washington to introduce legislation that would criminalize such behavior. A variation of the bill (the Video Voyeurism Protection Act of 2004) passed last year. Congresswoman Maloney said of Lifetime, "They literally have mobilized themselves into an advocacy organization that, I would say, has growing clout in Washington."
This unlikely effort has been led by Lifetime's executive vice president of public affairs and corporate communications, Meredith Wagner. In its early days, she said over drinks at the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan, Lifetime had a vague image as a network for women, but "we didn't really know what we were." So she and Bonnie Hammer, who has since become the president of the USA Network and Sci-Fi Channel, started searching for inexpensive, topical documentaries. "We'd go down to my house in the Village and watch the tapes and drink wine all night," Ms. Wagner said. "It was great because there was no downside - the ratings were zero." Lifetime began to produce public service announcements to go with some of its movies, and to hold screenings in Washington. "We were making it up as we went along," she said. "But we started to get really an interesting response from our viewers."
The ratings stopped being zero. Along the way, Lifetime started voting drives, beginning with the 1992 election, and joined with the Ms. Foundation for Women for the first Take Our Daughters to Work Day, in 1993. Its first big legislative push was in 1996, in support of a bill against "drive-through mastectomies," the practice of sending women home the same day they have surgery. That bill didn't pass, but it has been reintroduced many times, including this year by Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, and Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, backed by the more than 11 million signatures Lifetime has collected in the intervening years.
Becoming involved in direct political advocacy violates a basic rule of mainstream media. Since companies never know which part of the audience they may be alienating, it is regarded as bad for business (except in those cases where it is an extension of business, as when media conglomerates lobby the Federal Communications Commission about increased fines).
So why does Lifetime do it? The answer has as much to do with synergy as with democracy. And it places Lifetime in an unusual position, between politics and entertainment.
Take the mastectomy issue. In winter 2000, Lifetime's public affairs department took the writers and producers of the series "Strong Medicine" to Washington to meet with representatives from the Department of Health and Human Services and with health advocates. "We said, 'Tell us what's going on,' " Ms. Wagner said. " 'Tell us what trends you're seeing, the issues that we need to cover.' " What they heard turned into story lines in the series. This season, drive-through mastectomies are featured in an episode to bolster the case against them.
In the case of "Human Trafficking," antiviolence organizations and human rights groups brought the issue to Lifetime's attention, Ms. Wagner said, and "Trevor was charged to look at programming that would support these kind of efforts." Mr. Walton hired a director (Christian Duguay) and an executive producer (Robert Halmi Sr.). Then the public affairs department organized conversations with groups like Equality Now and the International Justice Mission, which rescues trafficked girls from brothels. Taina Bien-Aimé, the executive director of Equality Now, called the discussions "substantive and serious."
As Betty Cohen, the president and chief executive officer of Lifetime Entertainment Services, said, "I believe our advocacy work does a lot of things for us." That includes, evidently, the ability to lure Ms. Sorvino, an Academy Award-winning actress, to the network. "Mira did this movie because she cares about this cause," Ms. Cohen said. "I would love to have more actresses and actors bring their projects to Lifetime if it's something that's important to themselves personally, and important to women as an audience."
In the mini-series, Ms. Sorvino plays an ambitious agent in Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who is unwavering in her efforts to break up a ring led by Robert Carlyle ("The Full Monty"). The women and girls have been trapped into slavery by false promises of romance or jobs.
Ms. Bien-Aimé, who read the script and gave comments to Lifetime, said, "They wanted to do a lot of intelligence work on the issues in order to craft a credible story, to give a portrayal of the trafficking issue in a way that's palatable to American audiences."
And, perhaps surprisingly, the Department of Homeland Security also signed on to advise.
Jamie Zuieback, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement who read the script and visited the set, said, "There is a certain amount of dramatic license - we like to call it feasible fiction." But, she continued, "in terms of looking at this type of case, it's a fairly accurate portrayal of the complexity of the types of cases we see."
Lifetime has planned two screenings of the mini-series this week, one in New York City at the United Nations, and the other in Washington, with panel discussions about trafficking featuring the immigration agency and State Department officials. It is also supporting two anti-trafficking bills before Congress, and will direct its viewers to sign petitions on its Web site after the broadcast of the mini-series. Congresswoman Maloney, a co-sponsor of one of the trafficking bills, said, "The more Lifetime can help with the public advocacy, the better chance this legislation has."
But are legislative tie-ins good entertainment? For Lifetime, the answer continues to be yes.
Part of the Justice for All Act was named for Debbie Smith, a woman from Virginia who was raped in 1989, and whose rape kit sat on a shelf for six years. During that time, Ms. Smith lived in fear of the man who had sexually assaulted her and had threatened to find her again. When the kit was finally tested accurately, she learned that he had been sentenced to life in prison for another crime, information that could have spared her years of anguish. In addition to Lifetime's petition efforts on the bill's behalf, the network produced several public service announcements featuring Ms. Smith. When the law passed, she appeared in a spot thanking viewers.
With such a triumphant ending, her story has inspired, naturally, a movie, now in development at Lifetime.
