“What would have happened if I wasn’t here?” The question oozes out of Robert Pattinson’s Chris Hansen as a rhetorical killshot. Primetime, Lance Oppenheim’s movie about the rise and fall of Dateline NBC’s 2000s ratings juggernaut To Catch a Predator, depicts Hansen as savoring every syllable. Their “predator”—a creep lured onto a TV set disguised as a suburban home by a grownup posing as a teen in online chatrooms—is stunned by Hansen’s sudden appearance, shrinking under his righteous inquisition, and finally left to ponder his inhumanity as law enforcement swarms.
This was the conceit of To Catch a Predator, the short-lived but enormously popular NBC show that partnered with an anti-child exploitation group called Perverted Justice to ensnare would-be pedophiles into online chatting, sexting, and, ultimately, visiting adults posing as underage teens. Once inside, the faux-teen “decoy” excuses themself before Hansen appears, armed with withering putdowns and transcripts of the lurid text exchanges. “I’m Chris Hansen with Dateline NBC,” he announces. “You see how this looks, right?”
Of course, “what would have happened if I wasn’t here?” works on a few levels, some of them unintentional. The uncomfortable tension at the heart of To Catch a Predator’s conceit is that the answer may well have been “nothing.” The men trapped by To Catch a Predator certainly thought they were doing something objectively horrific, but would they have actually acted on their ugliest impulses? Would these men even be talking to who they thought were teenagers if To Catch a Predator hadn’t cast its net?
Primetime is less interested in these questions than it is interested in its characters’ disinterest in them. Few of the characters in Primetime question the ethics of what they’re doing. But then, neither did the viewers at the time. In fact, To Catch a Predator may have helped launch an anything goes attitude toward protecting kids, which, while obviously understandable, has ended up hurting and harrowing the cause. You can see this in several different corners of society but maybe most notably in the church.
Primetime is anchored by a fantastic trio of talent. Pattinson is mesmerizing as Hansen, a shallow gloryhound whose conviction that he’s doing something good is being poisoned by the thrill of stardom, a naked hunger for ratings, and a creeping inferiority complex.
He’s matched in ambition by Andie Bender, Predator’s producer and behind-the-scenes wizard. Played with remarkable emotional precision by Merritt Wever, Bender is competent enough to keep the boat afloat even as Hansen’s personal issues poke leaks in the hull, but has sold too much of herself to showbiz to stop and question what’s happening to her soul along the way.
The same can’t be said for Dan, an aspiring actor played by a tremendous Skyler Gisondo, who gets cast as Predator’s “decoy” alongside Del (Phoebe Bridgers). Dan just wants to get his Screen Actors Guild card, but he gets pulled into an exceedingly uncomfortable job posing as a teenager who lures men inside the house where Hansen can spring the trap. Dan has a knack for the job, but can’t quite convince himself of the total moral purity of the assignment.
Oppenheim, making his first narrative feature after a healthy career as a documentarian, shoots all this in shaky, grainy film, immersing viewers not only in the early ’00s but also in the seediness of the enterprise. The film frequently cuts to shots of the Iraq War, nodding toward the parallels between Predator’s elevated prose and the Bush administration’s warmongering—and the respective grimy realities underneath. Still, you can feel Oppenheim’s documentary instincts kicking in, both in the copious amount of scene-setting B-roll and journalistic eye toward the proceedings. He resists the urge to beat viewers over the head with any heavy-handed monologues or finger-wagging symbolism. Audiences are left to make up their own minds.
The audience I watched the movie with reacted with more laughter than I expected. The movie has some funny moments (a Texas sheriff asks Del what “NIN” stands for on her Nine Inch Nails shirt), but there was also laughter at a decidedly unfunny moment when a would-be predator exposes himself to Dan. Laughter is a human response to uncomfortable situations, and I don’t want to read too much into viewer reactions, but I was surprised at how much of it I heard during a movie with so much sinister subject matter.
READ MORE: Christians Started the ‘Groomer’ Lie—Now We Need to End It
But then, this squares with Primetime’s thematic arguments. Whatever Chris Hansen’s actual intent, or how much the moral crusade mutated into a personal agenda, To Catch a Predator blurred the lines between entertainment and justice in a way little else had. It made an unspeakable crime something to leer at. By giving Americans loathsome villains in anonymous sex predators who could very well be in your neighborhood talking to your children, Hansen was able to justify basically any tactics in the name of justice. You think Hansen’s work blended journalism, vigilante justice, and reality television in ways that cheapen a noble cause? Why would you question the ethics of To Catch a Predator? Do you want the pedophiles to win?
That question may have started on Dateline, but it didn’t stay there. Primetime doesn’t follow the ripple effect of its impact out of the 2000s, but it’s hard to watch the movie without thinking about Predator’s legacy, especially in the church.
Few causes are as obviously just as protecting children from sex predators. That is exactly why politicians and faith leaders invoke protecting kids so often. This is particularly true among Christians, who have been mobilized by worthy and effective organizations like the Tim Tebow Foundation and International Justice Mission. But in the years since Hansen’s show ended, that cause has become hollowed out among Christians in a few different ways.
The first is rank hypocrisy. Christian leaders have been some of the most notable perpetrators of these crimes, with Christian institutions offering subsequent cover-ups, as we saw in the child abuse scandals that rocked the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention.
The second is partisan weaponization. Words like “pedo” and “groomer” started being hurled indiscriminately and were frequently used as pejoratives for members of the LGBTQ+ community and their allies—an ugly trend that undermines the seriousness of the cause and suggests that certain people care less about protecting kids than they do enforcing a very narrow brand of sexual ethics. Meanwhile, groups like QAnon rallied much of the Christian Right to the polls with conspiracies about a vast political pedophile ring that only President Donald Trump could bring to justice.
Which brings us to the final manifestation of the hollowed out cause: selective outrage. Once re-elected, Trump marshalled the Justice Department to fight the release of the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, his former friend and the most infamous child sex predator of our time, and even tried to dismiss the whole thing as a hoax. Justice, it turned out, was more useful as a campaign spectacle than as a commitment.
The common thread through all this is that ambitious people have learned that the moral urgency of protecting kids from predators is a powerful political lever, and it can be pulled by just about anyone, no matter how interested they are in the actual cause.
The common thread through all this is that ambitious people have learned that the moral urgency of protecting kids from predators is a powerful political lever, and it can be pulled by just about anyone, no matter how interested they are in the actual cause.
Hansen didn’t invent any of this, but his show may have greased it. In Primetime, Hansen spins a yarn about being on assignment in India where scores of children vanished, as if taken by an unseen evil force. That evil becomes symbolic in Hansen’s worldview: a monster stalking the earth. But as the show’s upward trajectory ends up pulling everyone involved down, Hansen starts to lose track of where the monster is and whose side it’s on.
He’s not alone. Nearly 20 years after the show ended, we can no longer be sure who is predator and who is prey, what’s justice and what’s exploitation, what’s serious and what’s funny. The Christians who scream loudest about protecting children are not always the ones practicing it; the machine of justice is being operated by some real sickos, and it’s all being done for ratings. We are, in a very real way, living in the world Chris Hansen made. What would have happened if he wasn’t here?
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