The legacy of the hit reality TV show “To Catch a Predator,” which aired on NBC from 2004 to 2007, is a fraught one. Many Americans still view host Chris Hansen as a hero for using decoys to entrap potential sexual predators and putting their arrests on the air. But the show’s reputation took a hit when one of its targets, a Texas assistant district attorney, fatally shot himself as police and the TV crew barged into his home.
That shocking incident was chronicled in an Esquire story, “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die” by Luke Dittrich, which became the basis of Primetime, the first narrative feature from documentarian Lance Oppenheim. The real Hansen has blasted the movie as “detached from reality.” He also bought ads before each screening to plug his true crime streaming service.
The deal
It’s 2006, and the American viewing public loves watching Hansen (Robert Pattinson) corner alleged pedophiles. NBC head Jeff Zucker (playing himself) puts “To Catch a Predator” opposite megahit “Lost,” even as he warns Hansen that to keep that slot, the show will need to nab bigger fish than just garden-variety pervs.
Hansen goes diligently to work with the help of his tireless producer, Andie (Merritt Wever); and an online vigilante (Matthew Maher) who trolls chat rooms posing as a minor. Meanwhile, aspiring actor Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo) auditions for the role of a decoy on the show. He may not have his Screen Actors Guild card yet, but his freckled face allows him to pass as a preteen.
As Dan angles for his big break and Andie wonders if this is really the job for her, Hansen struggles to up the show’s ante while weathering a threat to his personal reputation. All of them will be tested when they finally hook that “big fish.”
Will you like it?
Primetime is not a sober, realistic look at Hansen’s lurid legacy. For that, watch the excellent documentary Predators (see sidebar). Instead, Oppenheim revels in the luridness, making it his film’s guiding stylistic principle.
Ajon Singh’s screenplay reshapes the already unsettling facts into a tense, noir-ish thriller, complete with a tormented antihero and a ticking clock. The old-school storytelling continues visually with Oppenheim’s expressionist compositions. As Hansen’s authority liquefies, for instance, so does his image, distorted by rain on a windowpane.
TV monitors are the main light source in many scenes, washing the actors’ faces in unnatural hues and giving viewers the nightmarish sense of being inside a giant aquarium. Director of photography David Bolen told IndieWire that Primetime was shot with “more than a dozen camera bodies and at least 10 different formats,” then printed to 16mm film. The result is grainy and retro — less a throwback to the aughts per se than to the whole seamy history of tabloid media.
These stylistic devices establish the film’s vision of Hansen as an American icon. Like Burt Lancaster’s Elmer Gantry, he’s a con man and demagogue; like Orson Welles’ Charles Foster Kane, he’s entrapped by his own myth, increasingly unable to separate con from reality.
Pattinson lacks the real Hansen’s aw-shucks quality; no criminal in existence would believe this gimlet-eyed grandstander just wanted to “understand” him (as Hansen often claimed on the show). The actor plays less of Hansen’s public persona than his sinister core (as imagined by the film), but that’s a perfect fit for Pattinson’s signature combination of teen idol looks and weirdo vibes. His Hansen solemnly tells Dan that nothing he does is acting. Yet the film opens with Hansen rehearsing his script for confronting a target, quoting a chat transcript in a tone of implacable moral authority. Everything this man does is acting; he even seems to revel in the drama of his own unraveling.
Primetime presents Hansen as such a familiar cultural type that he doesn’t need backstory or interiority; we know exactly what unpeeling the onion would reveal (a bottomless thirst for attention). Because he doesn’t change much, though, the movie also needs his increasingly ambivalent protégé. Dan is positioned as the viewer’s surrogate and the story’s conscience, which tends to be a thankless, tiresome role. But Gisondo plays him with great comic instincts, inviting us to laugh at Dan’s hayseed earnestness while showing us the decency underneath.
Some have complained that Primetime is too hyped up on its own sordidness to have a point. True, it offers no solutions, but it tells a gripping parable of how we got where we are. Hansen’s message to his audience is “Give me the power of a police state, and I’ll save your children” — a perennially popular grift, increasingly practiced by many at the highest levels of government. This is a horror film about what happens when we merge justice, retribution and entertainment.
If you like this, try…
Predators (2025; Paramount+, rentable): If you wish Primetime had gone deeper, watch David Osit’s soul-searching documentary, exploring the world of “To Catch a Predator” and its copycats on YouTube. Interviews with Hansen and the show’s decoys force us to ask who the real “predators” are.
Nightcrawler (2014; Netflix, Sling TV, Shout! TV, rentable): Jake Gyllenhaal plays an LA cameraman who sells gruesome footage to the TV news in another noir thriller about the dark side of the media.
May December (2023; Netflix): The intersection of media and sexual predation anchors this mordant Todd Haynes film, starring Julianne Moore as a tabloid-famous sex offender and Natalie Portman as the actor hired to play her.
This article appears in September 30 • 2026.
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