Primetime

Following on the heels of David Osit's thoughtful and ruminative 2025 documentary Predators, comes Lance Oppenheim's absurdly heightened satirical drama on the same subject. Primetime is less a fictionalized docudrama about the rise and fall of the ultimate "gotcha-TV" show, the Dateline NBC spinoff To Catch a Predator, but more of an exaggerated character study of its host, Chris Hansen. During the popular series' hastily aborted three-year run, To Catch a Predator producers would work with local law enforcement to set up sting operations using young-looking actors to lure wannabe pedophiles to their "homes." Once there, instead of the underage sex these men were expecting, they were surprised by Hansen and a TV crew that suddenly surrounded them. With videotape rolling, no lawyer, and no Miranda rights read, Hansen would shame these guys, get them to confess, break down, and often weep, hoping they'd get out of the situation they'd gotten themselves into. But, of course, the cops were always waiting just outside to take them in.

The show was catnip to American TV viewers who are always hungry for people they can feel morally superior to; and no matter how awful a person you are, you can always look down on a would-be pedophile. But despite the myriad folks who felt Hansen was "doing the Lord's work," his self-aggrandizement through the sleaziest of sleazeball "journalism" on a show that only seemed to further the sexualizing of younger and younger kids on TV and in commercials rather than reigning it in, placed him much closer to the pathetic losers he lured into his traps. Robert Pattinson has a field day playing Hansen as if the guy wore all his internal demons like a bright, shiny Halloween costume (Jake Gyllenhaal has never been this twitchy!). It's a preening, pumped-up performance that's laugh-out-loud funny, but by 20 minutes in, we kinda get it. There ain't a lot of depth here, so once we've seen what Pattinson is gonna do with the role, we're left with Ajon Singh's flat screenplay and Oppenheim's repetitive, tedious direction.

This is an ugly film, and maybe that's as it should be. To Catch a Predatorwas an ugly show about ugly people doing ugly things. But David Bolen's 1.50:1 framed cinematography, often treated to look like gaudy SD television, and the jumpy editing by Daniel Garber make this an unpleasant sit despite a few good laughs near the beginning. As Dan, a young actor hired as one of the show's decoys, Skyler Gisondo provides the film with its emotional center. He's a naive kid who gets in over his head and isn't treated well by Hansen or his producer (Merritt Wever). We're meant to identify with Dan, but that's the core problem with this picture. We should be made to identify with who we actually are, and that's not the wide-eyed innocent. We're the monsters who made To Catch a Predator a ratings juggernaut. By allowing us to feel morally superior to an absurdly exaggerated Chris Hansen, Primetime is guilty of the same sin as the show it's about. Osit's documentary Predators didn't need to paint Hansen as anything worse than who he is. That was plenty. By devoting much of its runtime to the culture To Catch a Predator helped create and foster, Osit provided a far more honest and hard-hitting exposé of the early years of this bleak chapter of American history that we're still living through.