‘Well, there’s something you need to know. I’m Chris Hansen with Dateline NBC, and we’re doing a story…’ If you heard these words spoken to you by a tall, blonde gentleman in a suit in the kitchen of a nice house or at a beach sometime in the mid-2000s, chances are your life would change drastically forever—and not for the better.
Investigative journalist Chris Hansen’s recurring To Catch a Predator segment for Dateline NBC has had a lasting and profound cultural impact.
For the few who are not familiar, in 2004, Hansen teamed up with the online watchdog group Perverted Justice, whose members posed as underage children in online chatrooms. When adult men made sexual advances on the decoys, they saved the chatlog and posted it on their website.
Hansen, with the budget of a major network news programme like Dateline NBC, took the scheme to another level. The operation expanded to a rented house rigged with hidden cameras and microphones, and the decoys would arrange actual in-person meetings with the would-be sex offenders. When they showed up for their ‘dates’, Hansen confronted them—and it was all filmed and later aired on national television.
Chris Hansen is still doing his signature investigations, now for his own streaming platform TruBlu. Meanwhile, the film studio A24 has just released a new movie about the To Catch a Predator series.
Since TCAP—as fans affectionately abbreviate the title—continues to have a strong online fan base, and A-list Hollywood actor Robert Pattinson was announced to play Chris Hansen, the upcoming film quickly became one of the year’s most anticipated releases.
Now that the movie is actually out, however, it left some people scratching their heads, saying, ‘Wait, aren’t the child predators supposed to be bad guys in this story?’
Chris Hansen is portrayed as an egotistical maniac obsessed with ratings. Even the film’s title, Primetime, references that aspect. The fictionalized version of events shows Hansen mesmerized when his Dateline segment is moved to a primetime slot on NBC.
Primetime Is Based on a Completely False Premise
The filmmakers taking creative liberties with the actual timeline is not surprising.
For instance, Hansen’s extramarital affair scandal uncovered by the National Inquirer took place in 2011, four years after the last TCAP segment aired. In the film, the scandal goes public imminently while Hansen is still working on the sting operations—a contrivance where the main character gets some moral ambiguity is completely acceptable.
However, Chris Hansen’s primary motivation is based on an ahistorical, false premise that in no way resembles the actual Chris Hansen’s life path.
Hansen joined Dateline NBC in 1994. He had been on primetime television for a decade before the first TCAP sting ever took place, covering the biggest national news stories, such as the Oklahoma City bombing or the 9/11 terror attacks.
The idea that he would get ‘drunk’ on primetime airtime is ridiculous.
Furthermore, Hansen had never stated any ambitions to become an entertainer. On the contrary, he has repeatedly talked about how the 1975 disappearance of mob affiliate Jimmy Hoffa influenced his career choice. That event took place right where young Hansen grew up, in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan. The investigative work of detectives—and, more importantly, journalists—fascinated 14-year-old Hansen, who decided he too wanted to become an investigative journalist then and there. Meanwhile, he never professed any interest in being an actor or a screenwriter—he is simply a unique individual whose teenage passion was journalism and the news, not films, sports, or music.
That is not to say there were no legitimate questions about the journalistic ethics of To Catch a Predator, even when it was still on air.
Starting with the third TCAP sting in Riverside, California, in January 2006, Dateline NBC and Perverted Justice closely collaborated with local law enforcement, who ran a parallel investigation. As a result, the suspects were arrested on scene, in view of the cameras. However, some objected to such a close relationship between law enforcement and the media. Some view the media as a quasi ‘fourth branch’ of the government, performing checks-and-balances duties on the other three. Thus, working so closely with police, part of the executive branch, was considered unethical by some.
The segments also aired before the suspects’ criminal trials concluded. This posed two problems: first, it could prejudice a jury pool against the defendants; and second, some of the men featured actually avoided conviction, yet they still appeared on national TV in hidden-camera footage broadcast without their consent.
Some of the acquittals were completely at the fault of Perverted Justice. In some of the cases of the suspected child predators caught in the Fort Myers, Florida sting, the judge requested that the chatlogs be extracted from the hard drives of the watchdog group’s computers. However, they failed to provide that, suspiciously claiming that their hard drives had been damaged.
The suspects caught in a TCAP sting, as opposed to a ‘regular’ police sting, also suffered immensely more intense consequences than those who committed the same crimes, or even worse. Due to the wide appeal of the show, the featured predators have remained under scrutiny by the fervent fan base, even a decade after they committed their crimes, unlike people caught in non-televized law enforcement operations.
On the other hand, Hansen and supporters of the show argue that the public exposure aspect acts as an extra deterrent to other potential sex criminals looking to prey on children, while also raising awareness about online child safety among parents.
To Catch a Predator Did Not End with the Suicide of the Assistant District Attorney
These ethical questions pale in comparison to the massive scandal that erupted after the sting held in Murphy, Texas, in November 2006.
One of the suspected predators caught in that investigation was Louis Conradt, the assistant district attorney in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. He chatted with a decoy posing as a 13-year-old boy named Luke. The conversation was sexual. Conradt spoke to the decoy by phone and even agreed to meet in person. However, he never showed up.
When Murphy police breached his house to arrest him at his residence, he shot himself in the head with a handgun and died shortly after.
This is where the plot of the new Primetime movie ends. The fictional Chris Hansen then has a complete mental breakdown, muttering his many catchphrases from the show to himself. Evidently, the real-world Chris Hansen was a lot less affected by the tragedy, stating multiple times in interviews that he ‘did not lose any sleep over it’. After all, subsequent police investigation found child pornographic images on Conradt’s computer as well.
Thus, the film perpetuates a common misconception about To Catch a Predator: that the one in Murphy, Texas was its last sting. That is simply not the case. One more TCAP operation took place in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in October 2007.
In fact, the biggest ‘fan favourite’ predator, Lorne Armstrong, was caught in that sting. However, due to the massive national story about the show following the suicide, only seven men were actually willing to come to the sting house. NBC realized it would not be getting enough footage to be worth its investment, and was also caught up in a lawsuit by Conradt’s sister. As a result, they decided not to film any more TCAP segments for Dateline.
The lawsuit was ultimately settled. Chris Hansen remained with Dateline NBC until 2013, but did not conduct any child predator investigations until 2015, when he reprised his scheme for the syndicated true-crime programme Crime Watch Daily under the title Hansen vs Predator.
Dan Schrack, who played the phone and on-site male decoy during the Texas sting, is also prominently featured in the Primetime’s plot. He is shown as being morally conflicted about lying to men to get them to the sting house, and it is implied that he feels some guilt over the suicide of Conradt.
Unlike the other major plot points of the film, this may have some validity.
For the record, Schrack went on to become a news anchor and television journalist for local TV stations in New York State. Like the Primetime version of himself, he was in fact pursuing an acting career when he took the gig as the TCAP decoy. And, based on the few statements he made about his experience, he did not enjoy that gig at all. In a 2025 documentary titled Predators, he said, ‘This was something that I had started to pack up as nicely as I could and bury as far back as possible’ about his time working for the sting operation. His publicly available resume also excludes his decoy work for To Catch a Predator.
How Chris Hansen Feels About Primetime
Chris Hansen has repeatedly stated that the production team behind Primetime, led by director Lance Oppenheim, never reached out to him to be involved in the making of the film. Evidently, since this makes it essentially an unauthorized biopic, the legendary TV reporter has been irked after he got news of the upcoming project.
After seeing it for himself, he did not grow any more fond of the picture either.
First, he would have only been able to watch the film before its wide theatrical release if he had signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), which he was not willing to do. So, Hansen went to a public movie theatre in New York City, New York, to view it with the general audience.
After that strange experience, he uploaded a video to his YouTube channel in which Jesse Watters interviews him about the film. The choice of the interviewer is no coincidence—Watters hosts a show titled Primetime on Fox News.
During the discussion, Hansen revealed that he and his team are considering taking legal action against the filmmakers, although he is still hesitant to file a civil suit. When Watters asked whether any scenes never actually happened in real life, Hansen bluntly replied, ‘Almost every one of them’.
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