“Primetime” serves as both a satirical critique of predator hunting, and of those involved in the phenomenon through the lens of former journalist and longtime predator vigilante, Chris Hansen.
The film is the narrative feature debut of longtime documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim. Oppenheim highlights a surreal and vaguely accurate period of time during the peak years of the famed predator sting reality show, “To Catch a Predator.”
The film seeks to put predator vigilantism and its growing monetizable nature under a microscope from the view point of those who helped start the phenomenon as early as 2004. In recent years, dozens of similar predator hunter personalities have swarmed the Internet, and they are becoming something of a powerhouse in modern livestream culture.
What “Primetime” challenges, through its portrayal of Hansen as a domineering showman rather than an authority on child abuse, is the value of these personalities in a time of reactionary social media content. Such content could be considered as being less about pursuing justice for victims and more about how to make use of real tragedy for the sake of monetary value.
“Primetime” is based on a 2009 story that appeared in Esquire Magazine titled, “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die.” This story, written by Luke Dittrich, covers events that took place in 2006 in which Hansen, in cooperation with the Murphy Texas police department, conducted a sting operation to arrest former Assistant District Attorney Bill Conradt after he’d exchanged explicit messages with an actor posing as a 13-year-old boy. When police entered Conradt’s home to serve him an arrest warrant, the Texas attorney took his own life. This event led to the cancellation of “To Catch a Predator,” and subsequently the end of predator hunting on network television.
The film stars Robert Pattinson as Hansen. Pattinson adopts several key characteristics of Hansen’s personality, namely his distinctly Chicagoan pattern of speech and brash hand movements when talking to one of his predator subjects. However, what Oppenheim and Pattinson leave up to the audience’s perception of the film’s nuance is the question of what can be done when abuse is directly contrasted with a hunger for power that comes from chasing and, on the surface, convicting predators in front of an audience.
What seems to be missing from some of the current public criticism of “Primetime” is the understanding that most of these reality show-esque performances may have little to no bearing on actual legal action against predators. While Hansen sought out legal justice for many of these people, this hasn’t been the case for modern incarnations of various Internet predator hunting shows.
Several recent ventures through this foray into predator hunting content typically feature an untrained YouTube or livestream personality doing what can be considered a parody of Hansen’s original network program. One key example is that of YouTuber Kenneth Chambers, better known as “Skeet Hansen,” who runs an eerily similar formula of predator catching to the original show.
In Hansen’s program, he would often engage with predators for around 15 minutes, eventually ask them to leave or follow them out as they left on their own and subsequently have them arrested. While Hansen’s real-life self interest in maintaining the popularity of his show was apparent through the commercialization of his work, he had a better conviction rate than Chambers’ and often worked with law enforcement prior to his sting operations.
A difference between Chambers’ content and Hansen’s program is the former’s lack of interest in working with local law enforcement entities prior to filming, instead opting to contact law enforcement after his content has completed production. While arrests are made, it’s harder to make these convictions stick.
Chambers will humiliate his child predator subjects in front of a virtual audience of nearly three million people by challenging them to videogame matches, recreating chat logs between his subjects and the staged minors for over 40 minutes to an hour at a time instead of alerting police immediately after arrival, or staging certain videos altogether. After enough time, he either lets the predator go, they run or law enforcement is finally contacted. Chambers’ YouTube biography very aptly reads, “professional Chris Hansen impersonator.”
Chambers will also typically have a member of his crew pose as a police officer or “security” to give the predator the impression that he works with law enforcement, despite rarely having connection to any legal authority until after he can secure a lucrative gimmick for his videos. Chambers often hides certain content behind a paywall to ensure monetization as well.
This begs the question, does this humiliation in modern predator vigilantism lead to less child abuse? Or does it just make it easier for predators to hide from relentless Internet or television personalities with camera crews?
This is the question that “Primetime” poses to its audience, and one it seeks to put into perspective in a world of pervasive digital influencers trying to capture the same formula that may have done more to prevent child abuse in a bygone era of reality cable television.
