Primetime (2026, Dir. by Lance Oppenheim

Lance Oppenheim’s “Primetime” is less a complement to David Osit’s 2025 documentary “Predators” than its mirror image. The two films examine Chris Hansen through lenses familiar to his own practice; the documentary is a multi-sourced investigation into why, the narrative film a dramatization of how. Both arrive at the same thesis, though the latter does so much more judgmentally: Hansen’s work exploited its subjects so heavily in pursuit of ratings that it anesthetized the audience’s empathy. And now, close to two decades after his primetime NBC specials stopped filming, that numbness has spread to today’s TV audiences and TikTok scrollers whom Hansen helped groom.

The film loosely follows the timeline of real events, but it is fixed in a very specific period of American history, with early 2000s ephemera scattered across the backdrops. Osama bin Laden’s face is plastered on the target at the police shooting range, justice for Saddam Hussein is promised on TV, and Jared from Subway is still celebrated with a cardboard cutout and a menu special, about a decade before he would plead guilty to child pornography and to soliciting sex with minors. The Iraq War looms over the movie in a pointed way. Americans, in the wake of 9/11, were inundated with war coverage from embedded reporters on a nightly basis (just an hour or two before the “Dateline” jingle played). As the internet blossomed in step, a generation became desensitized to images of mass destruction, so it would soon require abhorrent subject matter to attract attention.

This compulsion fueled the show’s success and popularized a binary, “lesser of two evils” worldview. However depraved its targets were, “To Catch a Predator” relied upon an intentional act of seduction, and the payoff in mind was not a prosecution, but prominence — a primetime slot, an Emmy. So much of American culture, popular or otherwise, now chases the same prize with little regard for the people whose lives are destroyed in the process. As ratings grew, so did the appetite for sensationalism, first from the host and producers, then from the country.

Hansen is not on trial by himself. The smartphone revolution and deteriorating social conditions (stagnant wages and the rising costs of housing and health care) would always cultivate a populace that glorified the hustle not just as a way out, but as a way to the top. But Hansen pushed the darkest scenes that could air on network television upon America and taught an increasingly voyeuristic audience that consuming vile content was not only OK but made them partly responsible for the good work being done. One suspects Hansen would have been disappointed if, in fear of being entrapped on television, every would-be predator had logged off forever.

When you tune in for lewd transcripts with all manner of sucking and being sucked, pedophilic verbiage colonizes your attention, and when part of the appeal is watching the mental torture of the psychiatrically unhinged, your humanity dismantles itself. It’s a very different mechanism from the one at work when you see a violent slasher film every October, which may numb you to guts and gore over time, but is nonetheless held at arm’s length by fiction. Hansen trafficked in reality, broadcasting deleterious fantasies in a precisely edited segment that quickly proved far too salacious to be heralded as a public service announcement, and too entertaining to act as a deterrent.

In the Truth Social era, it’s clear that broadcasting these things did nothing to prevent the further bastardization of internet communications; perhaps it even accelerated it, so that when the soon-to-be president was embroiled in the “grab ’em by the pussy” scandal, half the country shrugged. By 2016, Americans had let a decade’s worth of obscene sewage leak into their living rooms. They had heard something like that before. And they’d seen Trump on “The Apprentice,” too. It’s difficult to determine who the biggest predator on the NBC airwaves was.

To stop at the voyeurism charge is to let Hansen off the hook for his most heinous sin: the interrogation. His insistence on reading the transcripts back at the would-be perpetrators, entering them into evidence not for the jury but for everyone, undercuts the idea that this enterprise served an altruistic purpose. After he dismissed the men with his disingenuous “you’re free to go” catchphrase, a final cruel twist of the knife, the local police seized them. Yet Hansen’s mission was complete before they walked out the door: the elaborate extraction of shame, Nielsen ratings bought with their dignity.

A lean version of the show, without any salacious details, focusing solely on the bust, would have served the public just as well, or better: the production’s methods compromised cases outright. The ends never justified Hansen’s means. Even a police press conference as politically motivated as the one in the film, one celebrating a sting like a drug bust, would reverberate in the way “To Catch a Predator” professed to want, without any of the lurid specifics being spotlighted. But that would deprive the show of its predatory hunter. And that couldn’t stand.

“To Catch a Predator” turned the hidden-camera sting into a pop culture phenomenon, setting off a mass media trend that ran parallel to the United States’ transformation under the Patriot Act. Enraptured Americans sat on their couches and watched their most depraved neighbors humiliated on national television, and the idea fermented that the camera is only ever pointed at the person who deserves to be caught. As the country forcefully pushes back against Flock cameras, it’s worth considering whether our consumption habits allowed the surveillance state to further invade our lives. It wasn’t until everyone was tracked and logged like a suspected felon that the trance was broken.

The movie’s catfisher is Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher), the real-life leader of an online vigilante group called Perverted-Justice, which would procure a list of perps for Hansen’s producers by going into chat rooms posing as children and dangling a lure. That group is the sharpest throughline to modern, do-it-yourself mutations of “To Catch a Predator,” which are portrayed in “Predators” as both unintentionally hilarious (“I’m Skeet Hansen … and you’ve just been Skeeted”) and disconcertingly dangerous. Content creators not only imitate Hansen’s cadence and caped posturing, but seem to enjoy the perverse game of reeling in the predators by simulating infantilized and forbidden chat speak. TikTok avengers in Hansen’s lineage often opt for beatdowns rather than immediately involving law enforcement, littering the internet with images of developmentally disabled men getting chased and beaten in Walmart’s aisles and parking lots.

Because the intended crime is so heinous, preying upon would-be predators is a bulletproof grift, placing its provocateurs on an unconquerable moral high ground. “To Catch a Predator” normalized society’s co-opting of justice, asserting that it was OK to administer punishment even if you staged the scene of the crime and co-wrote the script. It’s a cannibalizing spirit that appears virtuous in this, the most bilious of circumstances, but quickly poisons the rest of our interpersonal interactions.

Hansen milked the concept for all it was worth until his lust for a prominent catch put the show on the attack, causing devastating consequences and forcing the network to reckon with the merits of continuing the operation. Louis Conradt, an assistant district attorney in Texas, took the show’s bait online, but stopped short of visiting the decoy’s house. The film depicts Hansen and his producers growing impatient, ultimately enlisting law enforcement to serve a warrant at Conradt’s home while the cameras rolled outside on his front lawn. Conradt shot himself in the head as the officers entered his hallway.

But even this tragic episode doesn’t make it easier to interrogate Hansen’s practices without sounding like a defense of the pedophiles, who, by public consensus, have it coming no matter the method of capture. In the age of Epstein and QAnon, had Hansen kept a national profile during the past decade (he has continued catching predators on lesser-known outlets, including a YouTube channel), it would not be difficult to imagine him running for office purely on a “Gotta Catch ’Em All” platform. Instead, he exists today as a caricature, rendered well in a playful and convincing Pattinson portrayal.

Oppenheim also mixes in some career uncertainty for Hansen’s top producer, Andie (a gum-smacking Merritt Wever), who is offered the chance to jump to rival ABC to work on the emerging “What Would You Do?” with John Quiñones. The new job is pitched as a change from the dark side to the lite. But even though “What Would You Do?” is presented as a moral contrast to “To Catch a Predator,” it is merely a more subtle, less sadistic portrait of the eroding social fabric, one that, by testing several subjects, can usually find a way to end on a celebratory note. The world isn’t any safer, but hypothetically it is. And ABC’s competing human-nature program only further crystallized the media’s desire to summon a jury and elicit a verdict.  

Skyler Gisondo’s Dan Plumb is the bait at the end of the line, a fresh-faced and high-pitched twentysomething who is desperate for his break as an actor. For a movie marketed around Hansen’s image, Plumb anchors the film, which ends on the resolution of his arc. The character is based on Dan Schrack, who was interviewed in Osit’s documentary and was clearly still traumatized by his experience two decades later. Gisondo captures this well, the light leaving his eyes when he encounters his first “scene partner,” yet Plumb’s career ambitions force him to ignore the surreal, corrosive circumstances he finds himself in. There’s a meta parallel between the wannabe actor in the film taking on a preposterous, ethically indefensible role to earn an acting credit and the roster of real-life actors making a similar choice to pursue a credit in this film, even if that credit is “Pedophile No. 8.”

Oppenheim marries imagery of the drab suburban decoy homes with fantastical, kaleidoscopic flourishes. Working in the native 4:3 aspect ratio of the tube-TV era, he elevates the material from our past into a pseudo-reality, where it seems reasonable to wonder whether “To Catch a Predator” was some network executive’s fever dream and nothing more. Oppenheim, who co-directed an upcoming documentary about Elizabeth Holmes called “You Can See Everything” with superlative cringe comedian Nathan Fielder, infuses the statutory seriousness of the subject matter with a potent strain of dark humor and plainly funny gags (Gisondo doing Pattinson doing Hansen).

The movie is almost as much a bizarro comedy as it is an unsanctioned biopic. Oppenheim brings the hammer down on Hansen and the network that enabled him, but he also elucidates the incriminating circumstances that led to his success. What that says about us is left for the audience to decide. After all, I bought a ticket to “Primetime.” That is more intentional than turning on the TV and tuning it to NBC. And it cost more than the price of admission.