Primetime

There are many questions regarding Lance Oppenheim’s latest feature, Primetime. Why did the well-known documentary filmmaker (Some Kind of Heaven, Ren Faire) decide to make a narrative film, and one centered on To Catch a Predator (2004-07) host Chris Hansen, of all people? The cynical answer would be Oppenheim found out about David Osit’s documentary on the same subject, the 2025 Sundance darling Predators, and it convinced him to scuttle a copycat doc and instead go full biopic. Although that would be a gross oversimplification of things, the strange truth is that the films overlap in their dissection of Hansen.

Predators is a sprawling doc that focused on the history of the infamous reality show, including the vigilante group Perverted Justice that aided Hansen in ensnaring predators by impersonating minors in internet chat rooms. TCaP’s ratings-fueled zeal to entrap and humiliate pedophiles (and potential pedophiles) culminated in the Murphy, Texas, incident that eventually led to the series’ cancellation. Osit’s film also showcases the effects of its legacy, particularly its influence on amateur “pedo-hunter” YouTubers whose blundering sting operations often stymie the proper prosecution of their targets. (Osit also applies this criticism to the show that this new generation of online hunters treats as holy scripture.)

However, in between its coverage of this pedo-hunting entertainment industry, Osit’s film reveals a different motive. In scene after uncomfortable scene, the predators break down into sobs, desperately asking for psychiatric help as their hunters stand over them in confusion, stunned by their adversary’s off-script remorse and bewildered by the twinge of sympathy they are experiencing. Repeatedly, the self-appointed hunters and hired decoys confess their conflicted feelings after the fact, briefly realizing the complexity of the situation only to then immediately backtrack. Sure, entrapping child molesters for content is incredibly manipulative, but at the end of the day, the perpetrators got what was coming to them. The hunters don’t need to feel guilty. In fact, it feels pretty good to catch a predator.

This thread reaches its climax when Osit finally interviews Hansen himself, who is asked point-blank about all the criticism his show received over the years and, more importantly, whether he’s ever felt remorse over what he’s done. Eyes darting, he answers Osit’s questions, albeit while giving himself praise. Yes, it’s OK if the average person thinks TCaP has some ethical problems, but Hansen moots any qualms with anecdotes about child-sexual-abuse survivors thanking him for exposing the predators in our midst. Osit eventually brings up a recent case from Hansen’s newer show on TruBlu – a streaming service that he produces revolving around true crime and reality shows – in which an 18-year-old was targeted for dating a high-school freshman. Hansen notes that the case was eventually dropped and the teenage “groomer” in question will not spend the rest of his life as a felon. However, Osit observes that the media will live forever on the internet, an easily trackable paper trail that will follow the accused far longer than a felony. “Permanent for now,” Hansen replied. “It goes away.”

Eventually, Osit admits to the host that he himself was a victim of a predator in his childhood. He developed a fascination for Hansen’s show in adolescence, watching it for the catharsis of someone asking molesters why they want to hurt children, why they do the things they do. It was only more recently that he had realized that Hansen never actually bothered to ensure that these questions were answered, and in his film Osit takes the opportunity to present this criticism to his childhood idol’s face. All that Hansen can do is circle back to his interviewer’s past. He reminds Osit that TCaP is his way of sticking up for the survivors, of giving them a sense of justice. “You are who we do this for,” Hansen reassures.

Of course, reality begs to differ. Consider Luke Dittrich’s damning Esquire article “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,” which describes the events of the Murphy, Texas, incident. The TCaP crew worked with local police to storm assistant district attorney Bill Conradt’s home after he failed to appear for his capture – only for the target to commit suicide after police broke through his door. Dittich’s piece underlines the distance the television crew and police feel from operating a real-life swatting attempt over a pedophile. The crew was working to make everything look as dramatic as possible for the camera, and the police ran a hasty procedure securing a warrant to take down their enigmatic quarry. Detective Walter “Gator” Weiss, witnessing this horrific operation, would later tell Dittrich his concerns as it was happening, the bad feeling that was growing inside of him as he was questioning what exactly was driving them so hard to arrest Conradt. The question Gator asks, the one that presumably inspired Oppenheim, more so than Osit’s documentary, was the thought the detective had in the moment, as related to Dittrich: “Why do they need to get this guy so fast, right now?”

Predators and Primetime act as companion pieces to one another. Osit’s attempt to find the answers plaguing him since childhood via documentary filmmaking only lead to denial, serving as an outsider’s portrait of a culture too afraid to admit any consequence, too entranced by the illusion that what they are doing is righteous. Perhaps it was that botched angle that led to Oppenheim switching over to fiction: If the present-day hunters themselves were too distracted by playing the discount-version Hansen to provide a clear answer, then maybe the director had to do it himself. While Predators asks why there are people who dedicate their lives to tracking down pedophiles, Primetime dares to answer.

Switching from the highly stylized but grounded approach Oppenheim used in his previous docs, his narrative feature goes all in on pure filmic excess. Shot in extremely grotesque close-ups and oversaturated blues, yellows, and pinks by David Bolen, Primetime doesn’t bother interacting with reality. The only name left unchanged in this fictionalized film is Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson). Played to exaggeration, Pattinson’s accent work and mannerisms bring out the eccentricity in Hansen’s nature that was subtly performed (and then memed to oblivion) in his show. Beyond the constant catchphrases and overly questioning demeanor, Pattinson portrays the host as an ominous character. Although in real life he would put on an air of nonjudgmental curiosity while interrogating a pedophile in the humiliation ritual of a lifetime, Pattinson’s Hansen revels in the rush of power he feels from making a molester squirm. Staring daggers at an ex-Marine predator (Tony Revolori), Hansen shows a fetishistic joy in reciting the molester’s chat logs full of sexual language to a child, spewing biting comments as his target attempts to deny his accusations, and watching said predator get beaten up by police after tricking him into thinking he’s free to go.

For Hansen, this exercise of catching pedophiles is one of many; by 2006, To Catch a Predator has been on the air for two years, a highlight of NBC’s Dateline lineup that has garnered the ratings to keep the show going but not the acclaim that Hansen thinks he deserves. With Hansen having won multiple Emmys for his journalism work covering child-sex-trafficking rings in Cambodia, the jabs the higher-ups give him over his latest project eat away at him, his lowbrow clichés turned into a punchline. However, a promotion for his program to enter NBC’s primetime slot provides a chance to change everything. Now the show is competing with the likes of Lost, NBC CEO Jeff Zucker (played by himself) advises Hansen and his just-as-ambitious producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever) to find juicier predators to catch, kicking off a downward spiral for the two as they begin a new production arc in Florida.

Meanwhile, aspiring actor Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo) is looking for a new role. With his only notable credit being a part in a Toys-R-Us commercial (a speaking part), Plumb is cast in TCaP as a decoy, an actor who pretends to be a minor to lure the targeted pedophile inside the house. After initially shrugging off the gig as a fast way to score his Screen Actors Guild membership – and then being sexually harassed by a predator during his first sting – Plumb quickly becomes intoxicated by the same high that has hooked Hansen and Bender, joining the showrunners as they seek bigger fish to fry. Eventually, Perverted Justice head Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher) gives them the lead they were looking for, an on-again-off-again target they locate in Murphy, Texas.

Before they embark on what ends up becoming his characters’ biggest failure, Oppenheim spends most of Primetime trying to understand what makes these people tick. The film comes at it from various angles, including career ambition, absolution of guilt, and even Hansen declaring himself a savior fighting the ancient evils of the world. (The latter is embodied in a horror-movie story he tells Plumb about a girl in India who saw a demon believed to be responsible for the brutal deaths of several local children.) Primetime cares less about the moral ramifications of TCaP or what effect it had on society and the discourse surrounding child sexual abuse, and more what would drive a person to want to punish people who commit such acts. Starting off a biting satire of TV akin to Network (1976) mixed with the sleazy noir of Nightcrawler (2014), the film steadily turns into an obsessive psychological thriller about a group of people so desperate for professional and moral validation that they enter a collective delusion of grandeur. It just happened that said delusion resulted in one of the most catastrophic pieces of television history this side of Christine Chubbuck.

Aligned with Ari Balouzian’s dreamily unnerving score, Oppenheim puts in the effort to effectively showcase a fraying state of mind. The world of Primetime, as accentuated by the production design from Alex DiGerlando, reflects the power dynamic the people behind TCaP want to inflict on their targets. The fake homes they used to lure molesters, normally just vacant two-story homes, turn into high-ceiling McMansions that allow Hansen to pop out of a staircase, towering over his guest as he looks down upon them from his metaphorical high horse. Even Conradt’s (Alex Winter) simple one-story domicile is changed to a giant, multistory estate, a white fortress from whose windows Hansen sees a shadowy demon staring back at him.

These obvious inaccuracies only highlight what Oppenheim is going after. Playing with the conventions of a biopic, he uses the accuracy-bending nature of the subgenre to find an ecstatic truth to it all. Chris Hansen probably wasn’t haunted by visions of demons – nor was he being blackmailed by tabloid writers over cheating on his wife, Mary Joan (Anna Faris) – but from his prior history as a journalist producing stories involving child molestation, who’s to say there wasn’t some trauma that he was fleeing or some personal flaws for which he was hoping to atone? 

Although that core idea may lead to some unsubtle avenues, including constant references to Moby-Dick as Captain Ahab convinces his maddened crew to help hunt the big, white whale, the palpable melodrama driving Primetime gives it enough pathos to craft a fascinating experience. Compared to another genre-bending biopic starring a Twilight co-star, Primetime shares a lot with the gothic psycho-drama Princess Diana biopic Spencer (2021), though instead of its subject trying to avoid her inevitable fate, Hansen hurtles right toward it.

Oppenheim gets the viewer caught up in the characters’ high, gladly taking advantage of their position to find any snippet of authority, no matter how unprepared they are for handling such responsibility. Maybe that’s why, in the years since TCaP was cancelled, Hansen and all the other predator catchers deflect when asked to look inward regarding their dismantling of pedophiles’ lives for the sake of their own gain. Because, at the end of the day, that is all that TCaP and all the content inspired by it can offer. TCaP doesn’t bring any sunlight to pedophilia, with its curiosity and journalistic integrity – no matter how much Hansen still defends his show as a work of journalism – replaced with sheer exploitative spectacle.

As a therapeutic show for sexual-abuse survivors, it doesn’t offer any substantive healing, only a fleeting coping mechanism in watching predators get taken down by police and surveillance, an experience that only gets emptier over time. The survivors caught up in the industry of pedo-hunting, as seen in both Primetime and the copycats in Predators, struggle to find much gratification in their roles compared to Hansen, uncertain about where they stand in the ethical minefield into which they’ve wandered. And as for the notion that TCaP is meant to stop pedophilia, the thought of solving the problem by arresting one perpetrator at a time has only maintained similar strategies but on a larger scale.

After TCaP’s cancellation, Operation Underground Railroad (OUR) was founded by ex-Homeland Security officer Tim Ballard in 2013, a nonprofit working in search-and-rescue missions to find trafficked children. Sources like Vice and Slate have criticised the organization for relying on the same strategy that Hansen and Perverted Justice used: exaggerating just how helpful they are, citing cases of raids that had a high chance of traumatizing the children they were selflessly rescuing, and hiring psychics and inexperienced specialists to be a part of said raids. During this period, OUR (now known as OUR Rescue after Ballard’s resignation in 2023 due to sexual-harassment accusations) had a penchant for self-mythology.

“The specific stories that OUR tells are intensely cinematic: bold, heroic, and extremely difficult to fact-check,” Vice writers Anne Merlan and Tim Marchman observed in their 2020 article after witnessing Ballard’s online gala. “What we found aren’t outright falsehoods but a pattern of image-burnishing and mythology-building, a series of exaggerations that are, in the aggregate, quite misleading.” However, despite the criticisms associated with Ballard, OUR got a strong following amid the peak of QAnon hysteria – including an endorsement from Donald Trump – eventually leading to Ballard’s supposed heroism being forever immortalized in his own biopic, Sound of Freedom (2023). That movie is now known for primarily staying strong, box-office-wise, against the Barbenheimer craze and stirring debates about its subpar quality vs. its seemingly sincere advocacy for stopping child trafficking. 

What people like Hansen and Ballard actually do, despite any support or praise that goes their way, is blur the lines between helping solve a serious issue and turning that same issue into a self-serving transaction. They could look at the problems of trafficking and pedophilia systemically, or figure out a less destructive way of helping children or preventing predators from taking advantage of minors, but then that would sacrifice the chance of making themselves the face of the solution. What good does stopping pedophiles do when they can’t make themselves the savior in the eyes of millions? 

This is the question Oppenheim wants to tackle. Zeroing in on the moral-superiority complex that TCaP brings out in everyone involved, the director illustrates how that unchecked, blind ego that fans worship ultimately leads to nonproductive failure. The more Hansen, Bender, Plumb, and Collin County police reel in their white whale – the government-employed pedophile they ironically turned into a fetish object for their own pleasure – the more their desired prey actually slips away. Once it becomes too late, they are left unsatisfied, conflicted, and yet hungry for more. While Dan Plumb’s real-life equivalent, Dan Schrack, quit the show after Conradt’s suicide, Hansen kept going. The incident made it to air, and the show went on for another year before getting canceled due to a lawsuit brought by Conradt’s family. Hansen is still working in streaming and alternate sources to hunt his whale, heedlessly continuing his journey 20 years after everyone else realized how problematic it was. 

Oppenheim forces his version of Hansen to feel this failure, an aching plea for people like his subject to stop and consider what effect they are having on the world. “What would have happened if I wasn’t here?” is a question he gets his Hansen to ask throughout, shifting from a sneering catchphrase to an acknowledgement of guilt. In reality, the answer would be nothing, because the most concerning part about Chris Hansen, as shown in his interview with Osit, is how he never stops and considers whether, after 25 years, his way of protecting children might not be enough.