Love it or hate it, there will always be an ethical question hanging over investigative and true-crime television, especially once the mechanics of reality TV enter the picture. It’s one reason To Catch a Predator, more than two decades after it first aired, remains controversial regardless of which side of the argument one falls on. The men Chris Hansen confronted weren’t exactly sympathetic figures. But what happens when catching them also has to make good television?
Directed by Lance Oppenheim from a script by Ajon Singh (itself based on Luke Dittrich’s Esquire article “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die”) Primetime examines the machinery behind it all. And after watching the film, one can be forgiven for feeling a little, uh, complicit while watching these sting operations unfold, including the infamous one that ended with a suspect taking his own life. We know why we want Hansen and his team to catch these men. The queasier question is why watching them do it can be so entertaining.
With multilayered performances from its trio of Robert Pattinson, Merritt Wever, and Skyler Gisondo (yes, Superman’s Jimmy Olsen doing a side quest as essentially Batman’s muse), Primetime explores what happens when media ethics collide with sensationalism, ambition, and the obsession with making the show bigger. The result is one of the best films of the year, and a convincing argument that Oppenheim is as assured with narrative filmmaking as he is with documentaries. More importantly, it keeps shifting the moral ground beneath everyone involved, including the people watching.
No wonder the real Chris Hansen hates this movie to the bone.
To Catch a Predator (and Dominate Primetime)
The opening sequence takes us somewhere in Long Beach, where a man (Tony Revolori) pulls up outside a house expecting to meet an underage girl. We quickly learn that he’s an ex-Marine with a family who has been chatting with underage girls online, and that the house is part of an elaborate sting operation for Chris Hansen’s (Pattinson) To Catch a Predator. Everything else, including the girl waiting inside (Phoebe Bridgers), is a ruse.
With To Catch a Predator suddenly offered a primetime slot, bumping another program and putting it directly against rival-network heavyweights such as Lost, Hansen and producer Andie Bender (Wever, so fantastic here) set their sights on making the show “bigger.” Bigger ratings mean bigger expectations, and eventually bigger targets.
Their team soon gets in touch with aspiring actor Dan Plum (Gisondo, Oscar-worthy for me), who accepts an audition hoping the gig will finally help him secure his SAG card. Days after seeing the movie, his audition rendition of “Seasons of Love,” prompted by his love for the musical Rent, still lives in my head rent-free, pun absolutely intended. Five grand per shoot, three episodes total. What could go wrong, right?
Apparently, plenty: Dan becomes one of the show’s decoys, changing ages and personas depending on whoever the team is trying to lure. Hansen, meanwhile, grows increasingly consumed with making To Catch a Predator the biggest program on television, at the same time problems in his private life threaten the image he has built for himself (the optics of a predator catcher being caught cozying up with someone younger and not his wife is indeed career suicide). Meanwhile, Andie gets an enticing offer from ABC while watching Hansen become more erratic; but the prospect of landing an even bigger story keeps pulling her back.
Then the team hears about a possible target in Texas, something big. The man is unusually careful online, seemingly connected to government and potentially important enough, so much as that the target has become the production’s own version of Moby Dick. He is eventually identified as assistant district attorney Bill Conradt. And once Hansen and the team decide that waiting for Conradt to come to them is no longer enough, the already-blurry line between investigation, law enforcement, and television production becomes considerably harder to defend.
When Justice Needs Ratings
Pattinson nails the opportunistic tendencies people develop once success becomes measurable. His Hansen openly hates Stone Phillips, even as Phillips looks down on To Catch a Predator while being sent to cover supposedly more important events in the Middle East. Hansen, meanwhile, is being asked to compete with Lost. I like that irony there: there’s something darkly funny about a supposed public-service operation being judged by the exact same machinery as a network drama. Justice now has ratings.
That’s also what makes Pattinson’s performance really resonate beyond impersonation. The filmmakers make sure to frame that obsession for ratings through the audience’s intrinsic need to see justice carried out. And so we tolerate the vanity and showmanship that are there from the start. In one scene, while the cameramen are focusing on one of the child sex predators they’ve entrapped, Hansen’s focus veers elsewhere:
“Can we zoom in on his pores?”
It’s funny, but it also says plenty. The man has already been caught. Now the humiliation has to play well on television. Pattinson gradually lets Hansen become aware of the character he has created for himself: the suit, the measured voice, the entrance, the interrogation, the reveal. Primetime drives the point loud and clear: Hansen can justify almost every escalation because the people he’s targeting are doing something reprehensible. We want him to catch them.
So what happens, then, once catching offenders is no longer enough for the man we’ve entrusted to do the catching?
Everyone Has Something to Gain
Wever complements Pattinson as producer Andie because Oppenheim doesn’t aim to make her Hansen’s conscience. On the contrary, here’s someone who, at the first sign of a potential hit show with through-the-roof rankings, can suddenly say she’s had enough of the verbal abuse and being taken for granted (which she stomachs…for the same promise of a hit show with through-the-roof rankings). I’m with the majority in saying that Wever hasn’t been in enough movies and with her performance in Primetime, that needs to change.
That contradiction is what makes Wever so good here. Andie can be sick of Hansen and professionally energized by the show almost at the same time. Even when tragedy strikes, the producer in her keeps working. What can still be filmed? Who can still be interviewed? What can still become part of the episode? Primetime doesn’t need everyone behind the camera to be cruel. Sometimes professional instinct is enough.
And Skyler Gisondo…man. He’s a revelation here. His eternally youthful look serves him well, allowing him to slide into any age range, depending on the fake profile Hansen’s team concocts to lure child predators out of hiding. And even if I can’t hear “Seasons of Love” the same again, I wish award-giving bodies recognize the actor’s work here because he makes that moral and emotional drift register without overselling it.
I also love how Oppenheim and cinematographer David Bolen shot the film: deliberately old-school, with a degraded, hazy, and soft-blur quality to it. The look fits the period, but it also adds to the anticipation whenever the team expects a suspect to arrive. I can only imagine the challenge for editor Daniel Garber to piece together different approaches to tell a cohesive story, which he pulls it off.
‘Digger’, ‘Primetime’, and the Business of Other People’s Pain
I watched Primetime back-to-back with Digger, and I feel like I made the right choice to do so, even if I admittedly came in blind for both films. Granted, I knew the broad strokes of the Bill Conradt incident, widely speculated as among the reasons To Catch a Predator was cancelled.
But here’s the thing: there’s an interesting throughline between the two films, in that human suffering and generational trauma are often commodified as entertainment, whether a play, a film adaptation, or a reality sting-operation show; and that the people behind said productions have egos that write checks their minds can’t cash.
With Primetime, though, the ethics of it all ring louder. Humiliation as punishment? Making evil legible? Justice becoming content? The show gives viewers a very clean ritual: somebody walks into the house, Hansen appears, the chat logs are read, and police wait outside. Evil suddenly has a face and a username. That clarity is part of why the format was so compelling in the first place. But to what extent does it become entertaining?
I keep thinking, too, about what would have happened if To Catch a Predator saw a resurgence or revival in today’s age of the internet and (mis)information. Maybe the more frightening answer is that its descendants are already here, scattered across an online culture built around public shaming, vigilante content, reaction videos, and algorithms that reward outrage. With its heyday during the internet’s early foray into the social media realm, the original show understood back then that moral certainty makes for good television. Now, everybody has a camera.
‘Primetime’: We Are Still Watching
More importantly, I love how this is clearly not a hagiography in any shape or form, as it explores how catching offenders stops being enough. Hansen, Bender, and the whole team want to get bigger, to dominate primetime, generate cultural conversation, and locate more impressive targets.
With that shift of focus comes an important distinction: the difference between “doing something important” and needing everyone to know you’re doing something important becomes dangerously thin. If a production believes strongly enough in the righteousness of what it’s doing, who decides when the camera has gone too far?
The trickiest thing Oppenheim and his team pull off is making all of this extremely entertaining. Primetime critiques sensationalism while knowing exactly why sensationalism works. That’s where the complicity I felt comes back. Despite the moral gray, despite the selfishness of the very same people we want to root for, we’re still watching.
So, yeah. No wonder Chris Hansen hates the movie.
A self-described cinephile who can’t stop talking—and writing—about films. Paul also moonlights as ghostwriter and editor for a few memoirs. He currently resides in the Philippines.
