“You see how this looks, right?” rehearses Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson), as he’s set to trap and apprehend a sexual predator who has been talking to a decoy for what will become the hit NBC television series To Catch a Predator. Throughout Lance Oppenheim’s depiction of the controversial “investigative journalist” in Primetime, Hansen is represented as a power-hungry, vacuous host whose sole goal isn’t justice for the real human victims of potential sexual crimes, but to turn a very real and serious problem into sensationalized entertainment for high ratings and Emmy consideration.
There’s never a moment where Hansen will talk about the human cost of a show like this – how he’s essentially putting his actors in legitimate danger with sexual predators who want to perform horrifying advances to them – because all he cares about is the adulation he’ll receive within the court of public opinion. The premise of To Catch a Predator is so simple that it’s easy for a gullible viewer to get hooked on its structure: Hansen and Perverted-Justice founder Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher) reel potential pedophiles in with their setup to expose them on television. Hansen confronts them directly through the text messages they’ve sent to a decoy and makes them believe they are free to go, until they are arrested by the police.
It’s pure sensationalism – there’s no journalistic integrity in any of its perceived “reporting,” exacerbated by the participation of Perverted-Justice and the use of actors to portray “decoy” teenagers inside a staged environment. But America ate it up, so much so that NBC’s Jeff Zucker (as himself, in one of the film’s many ingenious bits of stunt casting) wanted the show to directly compete in the Primetime slot, where most audiences were tuning in to television programs. This is where Oppenheim’s “fictionalized” account of Hansen’s exploitative practices begins to blur the line between a pure fiction film and a documentary, something he does on many occasions by having the audience confront themselves with perceptions of former child actors – Jonathan Lipnicki, Alex Winter, and Tony Revolori – cast as the film’s main sexual predators.
Winter’s casting as Bill Conradt, Rockwell County’s assistant district attorney who ultimately committed suicide after the police and Hansen appeared at his front door with proof that he was soliciting minors for sex, is the film’s most metatextual. The actor has been vocally open about the sexual abuse he’s experienced as a child actor during his time on Broadway, admitting that he experienced extreme PTSD “for many, many years.” He now portrays the predator Chris Hansen wanted to hunt for his show, knowing a high-placed government official would give him the ratings and adulation he’s wanted ever since the show started.
Conradt’s suicide also directly led to the cancellation of To Catch a Predator, and the eventual public downfall of Hansen as a journalist with no morals or integrity. Watching Pattinson portray him with such broad theatricality highlights exactly the type of self-centered individual he has always been. He exaggerates almost every single mannerism that has defined the host both on and off screen to the point where it feels purposefully caricatural, even going so far as to switch the goofy American accent he’s developed midway through the film, as Oppenheim embarks the character on a much darker journey than what was lurking at the surface.
Some have said the second half of Primetime is much weaker than the first, but it’s actually far richer than what comes before it. The first half standardly repeats the codes of many unflattering biopics – depicting the central figure as a massive piece of shit over and over again before actively peering into his psyche. In the first hour or so of Primetime, we learn that Hansen deeply resents his wife (Anna Faris), thinks about no one but himself, and doesn’t care if his actors, Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo) and Del Harvey (Phoebe Bridgers), are put in danger if it means views. Hansen might find it defamatory, but it’s hard not to see through this depiction the mentality that prevails among most Americans as they look for things that shock them, not tangible journalism.
It’s a bigger indictment of tabloid nonsense, in a world currently filled with an information vacuum, than Danny Boyle’s disappointing Ink, because it deftly exposes the rot at the center of sensationalism. To Catch a Predator made no search for “truth” or “justice.” It fabricated news to make “entertainment” instead of reporting the real human cost of child sexual abuse, but it worked. Police officers like the one depicted in the film (played by Bokeem Woodbine) believed Hansen’s actions were “heroic,” but all he did was exploit a real criminal issue for ratings instead of utilizing his journalistic skills to prevent child abuse away from television.
To Catch a Predator was never about prevention; it was about giving audiences a sensationalized experience for high ratings. That’s the most chilling aspect of Oppenheim’s movie, which admittedly doesn’t go deeper than its surface, but doesn’t really have to. David Bolen’s cinematography – which floats between the dishonest lens of Hansen’s exploitative show and the VHS scuzz that distorts our perception of reality – is enough to make us realize the extent of Hansen’s impact within tabloid journalism, and how, even after Conradt’s suicide, To Catch a Predator is still the primary example of many pieces of “sensationalist” media and forever changed America’s relationship with television screens.
But this seems to be only the primer for what Oppenheim truly wants to excavate, as a surprise drop earlier this month revealed that he teamed up with Nathan Fielder for a form-blurring interrogation of Elizabeth Holmes in the almost three-hour-long You Can See Everything. If Primetime’s instincts are any indication, Oppenheim likes to float between fiction and documentary, and in his first “fiction” film, the lineage he developed while making art like Some Kind of Heaven and Spermworld is still very much present. One eagerly awaits October 16 to finally see what will likely be the year’s most important document – and film.
Primetime will be in theaters on September 25, 2026.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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