by Foster Harlfinger, Contributing Writer
Why don’t you have a seat right over there? Chris Hansen’s To Catch a Predator first aired on November 11, 2004, as an investigative segment on Dateline NBC in which he partnered with online volunteer group Perverted-Justice to lure child predators into the grips of their sting operations, complete with hidden cameras, actors playing young teens, cookies and pizza to make the predators comfortable, and a team of police officers waiting just around the corner to tackle the unsuspecting predators on their way out. But what first began as a reality television experiment quickly grew into a cultural phenomenon spanning decades with one enigmatic showman at its center.
In the wake of Hansen’s original program, there have been countless copycat child predator hunters who post their vigilante exploits online, never mind the fact that Hansen himself has built something of an empire out of his journalism niche. Hansen has cornered the predator-hunting market across all forms of mass media, from his work with Crime Watch Daily, his Youtube channel “Have a Seat with Chris Hansen,” his podcast “Predators I’ve Caught” in which Hansen revisits his past predator-hunting cases, and his own TruBlu streaming network which continues to air new episodes of his self-branded “Takedown with Chris Hansen” to this day.
When documentarian Lance Oppenheim decided to tackle Hansen — portrayed by a phenomenally idiosyncratic Robert Pattinson — as the subject for his first narrative feature film, the framing of the ostensibly heroic Hansen as a self-centered man of dubious morality would surely rub some audience members the wrong way. But make no mistake: Oppenheim and screenwriter Ajon Singh make no apologies for the actions of the child predators depicted in this film, because Primetime is not a film about the child predators, per se. Building off David Osit’s probing 2025 documentary Predators, this is a film about Chris Hansen and an exploration of the moral leaps one must make in the pursuit of compelling reality television.
Pattinson’s performance is not merely an impression; it’s an evocation. He depicts Hansen as an image-obsessed vampire, basking in a fantasy of his own making as a moral crusader at the forefront of watchdog journalism. Oppenheim’s avant-garde stylizations for the film add to the sensation that you are experiencing a fever dream. The film’s alternating perspectives allow the moral murkiness of the whole affair to unfold. On one hand, we have Hansen and his TV production team led by fictional Dateline NBC producer Andie Bender, played with brilliant humor by the always underrated Merritt Wever. On the other, we have young actor Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo), whose industry naivete puts him in the heartbreaking position of earnestly trying to make a name for himself in the midst of Hansen and Bender’s web of reality television exploitation.
Populated by dramatic and colorful lighting, experimental editing choices, and carefully selected early 2000s archival footage, this film is a journey as sensorially stimulating as it is intellectually. It is both a mythologization and a takedown of the Hansen character, and Pattinson delivers one of the best and most ambitious performances of his career in a year which already contains The Drama, The Odyssey, and the upcoming Dune: Part Three.
Primetime was never going to satisfy an audience longing for a traditional Chris Hansen biopic, but that would not have been a particularly compelling narrative to begin with. Instead, Primetime offers a fresh look at our society’s enjoyment of public shaming, even when so much of the public shaming is derived from an artificially contrived scenario that does unintended psychological damage to others along the way. Between Oppenheim’s confident direction and the calculated madness of Pattinson’s performance, Primetime absolutely earns the primetime slot.
Rating: Loved It
Primetime is currently playing in theaters
You can read more from Foster Harlfinger, and follow him on Twitter and Letterboxd