To Catch a Predator was an influential true-crime reality series, running for a few years in the aughts, that had a simple formula: The show’s producers would pose as underage kids, approaching adult men about meeting them for sex. Then, the target would appear on camera until he was confronted by blow-dried news reporter Chris Hansen, who would interrogate him until the cops showed up and arrested the man.
The show was a brief phenomenon, which helped bring about both the true-crime culture of today and the widespread cultural obsession with everyone seeing one another’s enemies as pedophiles. The show came to an end after a 2008 incident in which a target, a Texas prosecutor, blew his brains out as Hansen’s crew approached his home.
In recent years, there’s been some revisionist examination of To Catch a Predator, led by the 2025 documentary Predators, which dove into the dubious journalistic ethics of the show with an analytical eye, but I remember finding it imperfect, going too deep in some places but not deep enough in others.
Now, we have the dramatized, A24 version. It’s called Primetime, and Lance Oppenheim, a filmmaker previously associated with documentaries, directed it. He made an outstanding 2020 doc about the Villages, called Some Kind of Heaven, and he’s the co-director of You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder’s much-anticipated film about Elizabeth Holmes.
Primetime is based on a magazine article by Luke Dittrich, called Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die, about that prosecutor’s death; I almost always enjoy movies based on magazine articles.
The film takes the opposite tack of the Predators documentary: It’s almost a pure character study of Hansen and a couple of other characters, showing how they were cracking up for various reasons leading into the tragedy. It’s almost shockingly undidactic; if you were hoping to hear characters argue about the morality of the To Catch a Predator project, or even watch the show’s fallout and demise, you’ll get neither here.
Primetime boasts a half-dozen outstanding performances, and a unique and nerve-wracking visual style, which is about as A24 as A24 can be. I’m just not sure it all adds up to much, or that it really has anything to say about its subject. I was afraid it would be too didactic, but in the end it’s not didactic enough.
The film follows a couple of years in the life of To Catch a Predator, where everyone is under pressure. This includes Hansen himself, who needs to deliver a hit, while also facing down a potential tabloid scandal. In this, he’s being pushed by then-NBC head Jeff Zucker, who plays himself as an especially amoral network executive. Merritt Wever plays his producer, weighing whether to leave the show, while Skyler Gisondo gives a chilling turn as the actor playing the decoy,
Also on board are the outstanding character actor Matthew Maher as a show producer, and singer Phoebe Bridgers, disappearing into the role of a decoy who can play both boys and girls. And in a nifty bit of stunt-casting, a bunch of the accused predators, including Alex Winter, Jonathan Lipnicki, and Tony Revolori, are played by former child actors. Revolori, who previously got scalped in The Rivals of Amziah King, is having a pretty embarrassing season at the movies.
People who closely followed the media intrigue of the day will enjoy the Zucker stuff, as well as the obvious contempt showed to Hansen’s show by then-Dateline anchor Stone Phillips (“I’ll be watching from Afghanistan.”) But the film gets its title from To Catch a Predator being “moved to primetime,” but didn’t it always air in primetime, even when it was part of Dateline NBC?
Pattinson doesn’t really look or sound like Hansen, and isn’t really the right age either, but he convincingly plays the part anyway. But it’s Gisondo who really walks away with the film, as a young actor who finds this type of work is getting to him- even as doubts or raised that this is the type of thing that could lead to stardom.
Chris Hansen is vocally upset about the film, even threatening to buy time ahead of showings of it, but the film, at worst, makes him look like an obsessive weirdo rather than someone doing something actively malevolent. The Predators documentary was much meaner to him.
