Seven million people watched To Catch a Predator on average during the show’s mid-aughts run as part of NBC’s newsmagazine Dateline. What exactly were they watching? A brave and necessary journalistic investigation into the nation’s vast pedophilia problem, or a lurid tabloid program that crossed moral and legal lines and augured an era of ethically dubious content, both on TV and online?
The new historical drama PRIMETIME, from the studio A24 and first-time film director Lance Oppenheim, revisits To Catch a Predator’s ascent through a character study of its host Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson). The movie opens in the middle of a sting, and it becomes immediately clear that Hansen is no straightforward hero. He is feverishly reading over the perverted messages sent by a predator he is about to confront, but this is far from an analytical, objective investigation: he revels in the moment of exposure and the perpetrator’s humiliation. Quick, documentary-style cuts accompanied by a frantic score rapidly advance the plot and capture the growing public hysteria surrounding the show. But the main focus of PRIMETIME is behind the scenes, highlighting the upheaval inside the production rather than the show’s cultural impact.
Much of the controversy surrounding To Catch a Predator stemmed from what happened after the cameras stopped rolling. Despite the hundreds of arrests made, many of the cases were thrown out due to issues with entrapment and the chain of evidence, though NBC claimed two hundred indictments and 120 convictions. Critics argued that the amateur investigatory team, comprised of civilians and not law enforcement, was sloppy. The sense that the crew’s priority was to entertain—to provide the on-screen “gotcha” moment—rather than to protect minors and provide due process raised concerns about the show’s integrity and led some sponsors to pull out. Things came to a head when a sting-gone-wrong resulted in the suicide of a Texas prosecutor as NBC’s camera crew and a SWAT team surrounded his house. The show ended in 2007.
The film takes on the controversies of To Catch a Predator indirectly, with sporadic mention of public opinion. Instead, the ethical investigation is into Hansen’s psyche. This confines the film’s narrative scope to a single figure; luckily, that figure is played by the superbly talented Pattinson. To its credit, the film refuses to make a simple judgment for or against Hansen. Our deranged, crusading protagonist admits of no reductive explanation. Since PRIMETIME’s release, some viewers have complained that, in the film’s portrayal, the predators get off too easy (though their wickedness is a given, one would hope) and Hansen gets a bad rap. But ultimately, the deft blurring of the lines leaves it to viewers to make their own judgments.
As Hansen’s domestic life suffers—the impending exposure of an affair looms particularly large—his confidence splinters, and he struggles to convince himself that the intentions of To Catch a Predator remain pure. After winning the 9 p.m. (“primetime”) slot on NBC, Hansen and his team need to outperform competing shows. With his show on the line, Hansen’s neuroses turn into obsessions. He’s trying to best ABC’s Lost and “[cleanse] the world of an ancient evil” at the same time. Those goals fuse with a predictable mania: he must reel in ever bigger fish—more notable and shocking predators—and finally “the whale” (the prosecutor), as Hansen, playing the role of Captain Ahab, and his crew refer to him.
Cynical producer Andie Bender (Merrit Wever) takes on a leading role as well. At first unsympathetic in the face of the depraved content, she relishes each debauched moment with a drawl that offers some comic relief amid the otherwise bleak proceedings. It’s clear that to Bender and studio executives, To Catch a Predator was an entertainment-first television show like any other. However, her eventual hesitancy to continue working with an increasingly unhinged Hansen brings out a hitherto absent humaneness. A job offer from ABC presents Bender with the opportunity to embrace normalcy, but she opts to stick with Hansen, propelled by a growing collective psychosis. Like Ahab, Hansen is steering To Catch a Predator toward total destruction.
The role of Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo) is also of paramount importance. A young, aspirational actor, he is thrilled just to land a job: on To Catch a Predator, he is the bait, posing as a thirteen-year-old. Boyishly naïve, Plum is thrust into the live production without fully understanding the nature of the gig. His psychological deterioration is perhaps the most tragic arc in PRIMETIME (no small feat). He grows to take pride in his acting, the popularity of the show, and, at times, even the “moral crusade.” But the line between fact and fiction quickly becomes blurred when he comes face-to-face with the real people, real intentions, and real consequences of the show—resulting in real trauma for Plum.
But the movie’s talisman is unquestionably Hansen. It is his untethered, contagious desire—whether to bring in viewers or “promote goodness,” we can never quite be sure—that leads to the morbid finale of To Catch a Predator. Assistant district attorney Louis William Conradt Jr. would be the first government official ever caught, and catching the whale requires the crew to circumvent their already dubious ethical boundaries. They are unable to lure him to the sting house and thus make the fateful decision to stalk his suburban Dallas home with the police in tow. His sister, Patricia Conradt, complained afterward to the local city council that police acted as “a judge, jury and executioner that was encouraged by an out-of-control reality show.”
Though Hansen’s time in the national spotlight was brief, he picked up on a craving for real, deplorable people to become sensationalized characters in popular media. A number of YouTubers have taken Hansen’s torch, posting predator stings that rake in millions of views online. Such operations are vigilante in spirit and, given the profits their channels make, their intentions are as murky as Hansen’s. The genre of “true crime” docuseries—often produced without the consent of victims’ families but earning studio executives millions—owes a similar debt to Hansen.
In portraying the gruesome final act of a fundamentally flawed project, Oppenheim certainly doesn’t express any reverence or regret for its demise. But neither does he completely condemn it. One is left with the sense that, whatever its motives, the show was an expression of a broader pathology that implicates the audience, too: a desire to turn literally everything into entertainment.
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