A lot of coming and going, but nobody gets much of anywhere

“Traffic: The Miniseries,” which begins tonight on the USA Network, is neither a sequel to nor a remake of “Traffic,” the Steven Soderbergh movie, nor of “Traffik,” the exceptional 1989 BBC miniseries (of which the Soderbergh film was a pale if brightly colored remake), so much as it is a brand extension. “Inspired by” is the operative phrase here, which means that the new model shares with its predecessors no more than a certain concern with smuggling -- not only of drugs this time, but of people and weapons -- and that it weaves together several apparently disparate stories. Like “Traffik,” it is long, and like “Traffic,” it is longer on style than substance.

This time the setting is Seattle and Afghanistan; represented by Vancouver and British Columbia, respectively, with the Afghanistan scenes dyed yellow, as Soderbergh did for Mexico. (It just says “foreign” somehow.) Elias Koteas plays a DEA agent who may have gone bad, while back in the American northwest wife Mary McCormack finds her phone tapped and her car followed. Son Justin Chatwin is hanging out with the wrong sort of girl.

Also in town are Koteas’ fellow agent, Martin Donovan; Balthazar Getty as a shallow young businessman involved with shady young Chinese gangster Nelson Lee; and Cliff Curtis as a Chechnyan cabby seeking an inchoate revenge for his wife and child, killed in a mysterious maritime accident. These strands interweave in a plot whose nearly mathematical logic does not mitigate its likelihood.

One cannot reasonably criticize a work for not accomplishing something it doesn’t attempt in the first place, but the viewer may at least be apprised that this is a markedly less ambitious work than its namesakes. It has a veneer of ambitiousness because of its length, but whereas “Traffik” (and to a much lesser extent “Traffic”) was thoughtfully concerned with an interrelated set of social problems and in the way that the political world is inevitably caught up with the personal, “Traffic: The Miniseries” has, beyond a few grandly flung factoids, nothing much to say about the world, or people, or anything.

What it is at bottom is a kind of large-economy-size post-9/11 terrorist thriller -- can you say “orange alert”? -- with an admittedly clever evil scheme finally revealed in hour three. To say any more about that would be to give away more than the picture can afford to lose.

The film is as padded as a baby’s bottom; it could be cut in half and still get all its business done. A great amount of time is devoted to getting into cars, driving in cars, getting out of cars, walking into buildings, walking around inside of buildings, walking out of buildings; small bits of business are stretched far beyond their intrinsic interest, as if the guiding aesthetic were mainly to fill the space around three nights worth of commercials.

The acting is fine, if limited by the script and frustrated by tediously rapid edits and demented camerawork, in the modern “documentary” style -- all abrupt zooms and jerky pans and confusing angles -- which generate tension without ever achieving suspense. None of the characters amounts to much more than an attitude and/or a platitude. We do learn that not everyone is as he seems, but that is not the same thing as character development, and it’s difficult to really care what happens to even the most sympathetic of them. Any random episode of “What Not to Wear” evokes more authentic empathy.

In the end you don’t feel like you’ve been anywhere but inside a TV movie. But it is a very long TV movie and proportionately the worse for it. (You could fit an entire season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” inside it and have time left over for dinner, dessert and coffee.) It demands six hours of your life -- six hours that could be profitably spent otherwise, even if just in contemplative silence. Or asleep. Or watching the original “Traffik,” available on DVD.

*

‘Traffic: The Miniseries’

Where: USA

When: 9-11 tonight through Wednesday

Rating: The network has rated the series TV-14 (may not be suitable for children younger than 14)

Cliff Curtis...Adam Kadyrov

Martin Donovan...Brent Delaney

Balthazar Getty...Ben Edmonds

Elias Koteas...Mike McKay

Ritchie Coster...Fazal

Nelson Lee...Ronny Cho

Mary McCormack...Carole McKay

Executive producer, writer, Ron Hutchinson. Directors, Stephen Hopkins, Eric Bross.