‘To Catch a Predator’ movie trailer drops years after cancelation | #childpredator | #kidsaftey | #childsaftey

A new film coming out this year will shine a spotlight on some truly grisly stories, including one out of Texas that led to the cancellation of the culture-changing To Catch a Predator.

Shown in the first trailer for Primetime, the forthcoming drama will chronicle the origins and rise of To Catch A Predator and its creator and host, Chris Hansen. The film was directed by Lance Oppenhiem and stars Robert Pattinson as Hansen, creating a portrait of a man and a show that changed television forever. The trailer shows the origins of Hansen’s predator-catching efforts with Robert Pattinson’s Hansen voice, echoing the questions the host would ask suspected predators when confronting them. 

“What would have happened if I wasn’t here?” he says in the trailer. 

The trailer looks like a knowingly gritty retelling of the origins of a show as morally complicated as it was popular. 

To Catch A Predator entrapped adult men attempting to meet up and have sex with underage individuals in a very intricate sting operation. The show would employ people to impersonate minors online and engage in correspondence with these men, luring them to a home where they would be let in under the impression they were meeting the minors they had been talking to online. They were then confronted by Hansen himself. Hansen and Dateline partnered with civilian organizations like Perverted-Justice and law enforcement to target and arrest child predators. 

The show, which premiered in 2004, received massive ratings, drawing an average of 7 to 10 million viewers each week across its run. It also received mixed reviews, citing its genuinely sordid and morally ambiguous tone, and raising ethical questions about the actual sting operations that were taking place and the dangers of entrapment. 

The ethical concerns came to a head in 2006 when Rockwall County, Texas, Assistant District Attorney Bill Conradt died by suicide after being targeted by the show. 

Perverted-Justice (PJ), a watchdog group officially paid by NBC as a consultant on the show,  and To Catch A Predator ran a sting operation in Murphy, Texas, luring men to a house. Conradt was one of the men who had been soliciting one of the volunteers, exchanging photos with someone he believed was a 13-year-old boy. However, hedid not journey to the house in Murphy. 

When the assistant district attorney didn’t take the bait to go to the sting house, the show’s team, volunteer group and a group of law enforcement officers initiated a search and arrest warrant at Conradt’s home in Terrell, Texas. A SWAT unit surrounded his home, eventually breaching the residence. Once officers were inside, Conradt shot himself in the head, dying shortly thereafter on the way to a Dallas hospital. 

“They came in, and they see him,” Conradt’s sister Patricia said in 2008. “He says, ‘Guys, I’m not gonna hurt anybody.’ And then he put the gun to his head and shot.”

The incident further questioned the ethics of the entire television endeavor. Police were criticized for cooperating with a television show and often skirting the lines of the law in service of content, with Conradt’s suicide as the clearest example. 

“I understand he took his own life, but I have a feeling that he took his own life when he looked out the door and saw there was a bunch of television cameras outside,” Walter Weiss, a former detective with the police department that partnered with Dateline for the show, said in 2008.

To Catch A Predator was canceled in 2007 in large part due to Conradt’s death. In 2008, NBC settled the wrongful death lawsuit filed by his family, initially suing the network for over $100 million.

The new biopic comes while society is still grappling with the commodification of catching predators that the show popularized. Some of the worst people you know,  streamers, influencers and creators, have latched on to the conceit of the show to get views online, often resulting in false accusations and physical violence. And they keep happening.

In February, as part of a “catch a predator” TikTok trend, a group of five college students in Massachusetts were arrested after plotting to lure and kidnap a man after posing on the dating site Tinder and chasing and assaulting a man on their college campus. The man thought he was there to meet an 18-year-old woman met on the dating site, but it was actually a group of students made up of two men and two women.  

The five students were charged with conspiracy and kidnapping charges but pleaded not guilty to all charges.