Christopher Rhoten
Like much of the television that dominated the 2000s, NBC’s To Catch a Predator was built around a provocative hook: hunting child predators through sting operations that culminate in direct confrontation. Its appeal seemed inseparable from its controversial nature, as combating the sexual exploitation of children was clearly admirable, but humiliating its targets for the entertainment of a primetime audience carried the oily sheen of sensationalism—the product of someone eager to play judge and executioner while ruining someone else’s life on television. Legal and ethical concerns did little to diminish the show’s popularity, but it was eventually canceled after one of its stings resulted in a real-life death. Host Chris Hansen, however, has continued to produce variations on the format over the years, even as his reputation has veered from the picture of justice he may once have briefly represented.
While Lance Oppenheim (Spermworld, the forthcoming You Can See Everything) is a self-proclaimed “fan” of the show, his new adaptation of Hansen’s life, Primetime, is unflinchingly, unflatteringly crazy. Alongside the streaking Robert Pattinson (The Drama, Die My Love), the duo takes an approach to Hansen that will feel familiar to the presenter, dipping into the mud to create a sordid, surreal crime thriller beefed up for maximum entertainment at the expense of almost everything else. It’s hardly the most cerebral way to approach Hansen or this particular era of television, but it’s still a nasty, darkly funny look at multiple forms of complicity.
Fudging details and consolidating timelines in typical Hollywood fashion, Primetime mostly follows Skyler Gisondo’s Dan, an aspiring young actor hired to play a thirteen-year-old boy for the program. After some prodding from the show’s veteran producer Andie (Merritt Wever) and good-hearted, fellow decoy Del (musician Phoebe Bridgers, who’s also recorded an absolute banger that plays over the closing credits), Hansen takes Dan under his wing and tries to convince him the show is important enough to justify whatever very real trauma he may be exposed to while “acting.” Hansen assures Dan that he himself is never performing, but a parallel story involving an Esquire tell-all about his serial adultery suggests otherwise.
From its hallucinatory opening frames onward, the question of what’s real becomes the focus in a “docuphantasia” that feels like it’s being broadcast from another dimension. Primetime is only a traditional biopic for about ten minutes, and Pattinson’s Hansen is less a man than a cultural force of nature—a force obsessed with punishing the “ancient evil” of pedophilia, given a face by way of predators accosted on the show but also a demonic figure that haunts Hansen in visions. Channeling the fervor and anger of the era’s response to the Iraq War, Lance Oppenheim parallels Hansen’s crusade with the appetite for punishment that defined those years. When a fellow passenger on a flight suggests that Chris Hansen ought to simply kill the pedophiles he catches, Hansen replies that what he does is worse. His power comes not merely from exposing people, but from turning the discovery of their crimes into a spectacle that everyone can participate in, one with an almost erotic intensity.
The Batman star more or less proves himself perhaps an equally compelling casting choice for the Joker, delivering a campy, unhinged performance that easily ranks as his funniest yet. His smarmy pronunciations and nervous, childish outbursts evoke some otherworldly cross between Jim Carrey and David Hayter: a man ravenous for ratings who’s become a walking persona. He scowls in rage when an NBC anchor questions his journalistic chops, and when he calls his wife—a deliciously bizarre cameo by Anna Faris—he introduces himself as Chris Hansen out of habit. Still, it’s Gisondo who arguably steals the show. His growing disillusionment, born from the realization that no one is actually looking for plain old reality, gives the film its emotional center as it barrels toward an explosive climax in a thunderstorm.
Primetime never stops finding dark humor in a story about a pedo hunter armed with his own catchphrases, but its final third is noticeably closer to horror than any comparable subgenre. The film keeps circling back to performance, making it clear that wayward notes are sour no matter who’s singing the tune. Hansen becomes virtually catatonic for long stretches as he descends into chasing a “whale” of a predator big enough to keep his spot on primetime television, and the film’s glitchy, color-soaked visuals and ‘80s-inspired score push the movie further and further into pure fever dream. By the end, the distinction between the sting, the performance, and Hansen’s own warped fantasies becomes as blurry as the static on a CRT television.
It is unfortunate, however, that a scattershot quality prevents Lance Oppenheim’s narrative debut from ever feeling totally taut. Ajon Singh’s screenplay offers a shallow, skin-deep dive into culpability overall, one more interested in putting you inside the frenzied mind of a man obsessed than in interrogating the machinery around or inside him. The film leans heavily on the strength of the performers and its authentic presentation, as subplots meant to supplement and enrich Pattinson’s deliberately thin depiction only make the throughline less clear. Hansen himself might not be happy with the portrayal here, but both “ode” and “takedown” seem inappropriate terms for a film this detached from reality.
With David Osit’s already searing documentary Predators having been released just last year, perhaps it’s understandable that Primetime is less interested in the facts than in recreating the sensation of being trapped inside Hansen’s Sisyphean worldview, and the bigger picture questions might not seem as fun as shooting with thirty different cameras and finding thirty shades of blue in the grade. It’s all open to a bit of interpretation, though it should be obvious that none of those interpretations are sympathetic toward the men captured by Perverted Justice. I suppose that nuance was never a part of To Catch a Predator’s appeal, though, and it’s to be expected that Primetime taking its protagonist’s moral grayness as a given will make somebody mad.
Having grown up in the decade after the turn of the century and before the internet fully cannibalized our interactions, I remember a time that felt very different from the one we live in now—more mysterious and stranger, connected only intermittently in ways that now seem almost quaint. Without social media dominating our attention spans, television still held enormous power in shaping Western culture. And without streaming services ready to serve up whatever the week’s fixation is, we watched whatever happened to be on. Cable was the Wild West of entertainment, a chaotic ecosystem that could still produce content that became collective cultural experiences.
Primetime understands that To Catch a Predator was a product of that strange environment: a hazy convergence of moral panic, celebrity, journalism, voyeurism, reality TV, and the enormous appetite of a very hungry audience. If the righteous anger that propelled Hansen to the top was, at least in this film’s version of events, another mask for exploitation, then Oppenheim and company have returned the favor; maybe not in a flattering or especially complex way, but true to Hansen’s show, one designed for maximum engagement. The idea of Chris Hansen—avenger, detective, performer, madman—anchors Primetime’s surreal, sleazy descent into a world that no longer exists.
