It’s 2006, and a grown man arrives at a nondescript home in Long Beach, California, intending to have sex with someone he believes to be a teenage girl. She offers him a plate of freshly baked cookies, then momentarily steps out of the room. Suddenly, a man in a suit emerges from behind a curtain.
“Why don’t you have a seat right there?” he asks. “I’m Chris Hansen from Dateline NBC.”
Actually, it’s Robert Pattinson, the star of the Twilight film franchise, playing an amped-up version of Hansen in Primetime, a new movie that delves into one of the most controversial TV shows of the last quarter century, raising uncomfortable questions about our voyeuristic interest in sexual predators and public shaming.
To Catch a Predator aired on NBC from 2004 to 2007, beginning as a segment on Dateline, then spinning off on its own. NBC producers coordinated with local law enforcement and a vigilante group called Perverted Justice to set up high-tech sting operations. Members of Perverted Justice would hang out in chat rooms — pretending to be children as young as twelve or thirteen — where they’d strike up explicit conversations with adults.
The adults were lured to a house, wired with hidden cameras, with the promise of sex. They were greeted by “decoys” — actors in their late teens and early twenties posing as children — then ambushed by Hansen, who would emerge from a closet or back room to confront the would-be predators about their intentions. “You see how this looks, right?” Pattinson says in a widely memed moment from the movie. After long and sometimes anguished conversations with Hansen, the men (it was always men) were told they were free to leave, only to be apprehended on their way out the door by law enforcement agents who sometimes disguised themselves as shrubbery.
To Catch a Predator aired on broadcast TV during an era of extreme sensationalism, typified by shows like The Swan, a competitive beauty pageant in which women transformed themselves through extreme plastic surgery and dieting, or Kid Nation, which was essentially a reality version of Lord of the Flies. Yet even by these lurid standards, To Catch a Predator was in a league of its own.
Although it had an ostensibly worthy aim — stopping sexual predators before they could abuse children — the show was more interested in scoring big ratings than in finding solutions to a pervasive societal ill that still very much exists today. It existed to shame and humiliate a few rather pathetic men, but did nothing to interrogate — and arguably even fed into — the hypersexualization of teenage girls in the aughts, a period when prominent men felt free to create a “Jailbait Countdown Clock,” tracking the minutes until the Olsen twins turned eighteen, and to publicly speculate about Lindsay Lohan’s sexual prowess.
For a time, the show was a hit, averaging 7 million viewers on NBC and garnering even more in constant reruns on MSNBC. It was widely spoofed -- on The Simpsons, 30 Rock, and even at the Emmy Awards.
But in November 2006, things took a deadly turn when Bill Conradt, a former assistant district attorney in Texas, killed himself just as a SWAT team and To Catch a Predator crew entered his home. According to a 2007 Esquire article (which served as the basis for Primetime), producers pressured police into arresting Conradt at home when he failed to turn up at the decoy house. The episode aired on NBC, despite a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Conradt’s sister, but the show had trouble attracting advertisers and was soon canceled.
To Catch a Predator left what can only be described as an extremely mixed legacy. Viewed generously, the show helped raise awareness about the threat of online predators at a pivotal moment in the history of the internet, and resulted in the arrest of hundreds of potential abusers. A more skeptical take is that the show turned vigilante justice into bottom-feeding entertainment, relying on ethically dubious tactics to entrap a handful of unfortunate losers, while the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world remained free.
Primetime is not particularly interested in moral ambiguity. It follows Hansen, his gum-chomping producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), and a wide-eyed decoy named Dan (Skyler Gisondo) as To Catch a Predator becomes a full-blown cultural phenomenon. Directed by Lance Oppenheim, a documentarian making his narrative debut, the movie takes a clear stance on the show and its oleaginous host. Pattinson plays Hansen as an unhinged, ratings-obsessed narcissist, whose zealous desire to catch a “whale” — a high-profile predator — results in the fateful decision to bring the production to Texas.
Though he views himself as a moral crusader, Hansen, in this telling, is as creepy and exploitative as the would-be predators he relentlessly pursues on TV. He recites portions of the lewd chat transcripts with evident glee, seems totally unconcerned with the well-being of the show’s traumatized decoys, and cheats on his wife with a younger woman. (Something that Hansen reportedly did in real life.)
Primetime is the latest pop culture project to reexamine the toxic reality TV of the aughts, following recent docuseries about America’s Next Top Model, The Biggest Loser, and Girls Gone Wild. But it’s the only one (at least so far) to do so cinematically, using a garish color palette, tight close-ups, and other aesthetic choices designed to make viewers feel queasy about what they’re watching.
Released last Friday, Primetime brought in more than $19 million on a reported budget of just $15 million — exceeding box office expectations. The film has performed especially well with Gen Z — moviegoers who were too young to watch To Catch a Predator when it aired on NBC and may not even understand the concept of primetime TV. (Time slots? What are those?) According to Indiewire, 69 percent of the opening weekend audience was under thirty, suggesting that something about this tale from the recent past resonates with Gen Z.
Maybe it’s Pattinson himself, who has evolved from teen-vampire heartthrob into one of contemporary cinema’s most charismatic weirdoes. Maybe it’s the imprimatur of A24, a studio known for edgy horror movies that appeal to younger audiences. Or maybe it’s the film’s portrayal of a particularly crude era in media history, the disastrous effects of which we’ll be reckoning with for the rest of our lives. In one of Primetime’s most talked-about scenes, Hansen meets with NBC president Jeff Zucker, who tells him, “I don’t really like your show, but Americans do.” With Friends off the air, NBC needs a hit. So Zucker (who appears as himself) moves the show to 9 p.m. on Wednesdays, where it can compete against Lost on ABC.
Zucker oversaw NBC during the era of shows like Fear Factor and The Biggest Loser, and is one of the people most responsible for giving Donald Trump a nationally televised platform to burnish his image with The Apprentice. His laissez-faire attitude — “I’m just giving the people what they want!” — enabled the sordid mess of To Catch a Predator, and arguably helped pave the way for Trump’s political rise.
You may not be surprised to learn that the real Hansen is not a fan of Primetime (even though he hasn’t actually seen it) and may take legal action against the filmmakers. “It feels exploitative to me,” he recently said of the movie. “It feels sneaky and disingenuous to me that they would do this and not even say, ‘This is what we’re doing.’” (Irony noted.)
But Hansen, who left NBC in 2013, also knows an opportunity when he sees one. He has taken out ads in theaters showing the movie to promote his streaming service, TruBlu, where he stages To Catch a Predator-style sting operations on a show called Takedown. Last year, he even went on a ride-along with ICE agents, hyping up the experience to Jesse Watters on Fox News. “These are dedicated men and women who are trying to get criminals out of this country,” he said.
Hansen may object to Primetime, but he participated in Predators, a documentary that takes a far more nuanced look at the To Catch a Predator phenomenon. Directed by David Osit, the film explores the many legally and ethically suspect aspects of the show, particularly the way that creating TV-worthy spectacle took precedence over effective law enforcement (and sometimes resulted in cases that were “unprosecutable,” in the words of one detective).
Osit meets with former decoys, who still feel shaken by their experiences on the show, and with copycats who produce their own Hansen-style investigations on YouTube. He interviews the mother of an eighteen-year-old high school student who was targeted by Hansen’s Takedown and arrested for soliciting sex with a fifteen-year-old. “I don’t know how the worst day of my life could be something that people are getting snacks for,” she says.
Predators (which you can stream on Paramount+, or rent from Apple TV) attempts to answer a question that Primetime doesn’t begin to address, which is why so many people watch these shows in the first place. Osit, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, says he watched To Catch a Predator hoping for some understanding of what had happened to him. But, he concludes, the show was never about understanding.
“This genre of TV doesn’t deter criminals or get to the bottom of their crimes. It just helps us enjoy it,” he says. “We make TV, and we point cameras at something, and the trauma continues.”
Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian
And the so-called "reality" shows continue unabated. Including the Mormon "housewife" who threw bar stools and chairs at her partner in front of her child. Do people really believe they are watching other people's dirt? Don't they know all that crap is scripted AND don't they have enough dirt in their own lives?
Yes, we keep failing women. The only thing that will change that fact is men confronting other men about their despicable behavior. It may have to break the unspoken male code, the quick wink, the fist pump, the protection of rapists, the feeling of power, of control. However, there are plenty of good men willing to protect and respect women. Please stand up and please speak up so we women can honor you.