Spoiler alert: This column discusses major details about the plot of "Primetime."
"Primetime," starring Robert Pattinson as pedophile hunter Chris Hansen, asks a question worth sitting with: When does a moral mission get corrupted by the pursuit of mass appeal?
By exploiting the misery of unsympathetic child predators, "To Catch a Predator" catapulted to the top of 2000s television, averaging nearly 7 million viewers during its peak season. It also drew plenty of controversy. Critics argued the show amounted largely to entrapment and chased sensational TV moments over its stated goal of exposing dangerous predators.
"Primetime" shows how the good Hansen did was corrupted by the chase for ratings and personal ambition. What the movie won't do is
take a firm stance on whether those flaws tarnish the legacy of the show and the genre it spawned.
Great performances, competing ambitions
I have no qualms about luring out and exposing people with a compulsion to prey on children, and "To Catch a Predator" did plenty of good on that front. The show led to 200 indictments and 120 convictions, according to NBC.
Part of the show's appeal, at least for those who support its mission, was that it locked up real predators who had proved willing to act on their urges. But as with any entertainment production, individual ambitions were at play, whether running the most popular show on TV or landing a valuable acting credit.
Pattinson is nothing short of fantastic. He captures Hansen's voice, cadence and mannerisms uncannily well, and the movie leans on him to help the audience understand Hansen.
The same goes for Skyler Gisondo as "Decoy Dan," one of the real-life actors who posed as children in "Dateline” sting operations. Dan embodies one of the movie's key themes: opportunism. He's there to grow his brand as an actor, unlike other members of Hansen's team who see themselves as "activists" making a real difference.
Hansen's showrunner, played by Merritt Wever, has a single goal: making the show as big as possible, with little concern for its impact on child abuse.
Through these performances, the film demonstrates how a show that does good can be hijacked by personal ambition. Hansen is framed as its moral force, confronting an "ancient evil." He has his own hunger for stardom, but the film makes clear that the machine he built was steered toward ratings by the people running it.
Still, the movie left me wanting a sharper answer to its central question. It shows how such a mission can be corrupted but says little about whether Hansen and his crew did enough good to justify their pursuit of fame. In my view, "To Catch a Predator" did real good, but the people behind it let the series chase ratings over results, and that's what eventually killed it.
'Primetime' doesn't earn its payoff
The performances make each character's ambitions believable, but the movie never quite assembles them into the punch they deserve.
The film's climax is the suicide of Bill Conradt, a Texas assistant district attorney whose online chats with someone he believed to be a minor were exposed to law enforcement by the “Dateline” team. When it became clear Conradt wouldn't come to the sting house, Hansen's team and local police took the operation to him. That broke with the show's usual practice, and the movie portrays the decision as driven by the hunt for a "whale" – a big target that would bring big ratings.
The suicide is dramatized, with Hansen and Conradt locking eyes from afar as Conradt pulls the trigger. That moment could have been the payoff, showing how Hansen let personal ambition drive the show out of control, but the film doesn't fully commit to it.
Decoy Dan hints at moral qualms about how Hansen pursued Conradt, but they seem to come from nowhere in the third act, after an arc spent single-mindedly chasing an acting credit. The showrunner, the least sympathetic of the bunch, moves on from the suicide instantly and starts figuring out how best to exploit it for TV. Hansen just stands there, tears rolling down his face.
The problem is that instead of a runaway train bent on becoming "the biggest show on TV," "Primetime" never fully reckons with its main characters' faults, and it offers only a tepid take on whether Hansen and his team were morally culpable for the damage they caused. The film invites audiences to weigh the good the show did against its exploitation of human depravity for ratings, then has little to say on the matter itself.
The film leaves all of this murky, giving viewers room to draw their own conclusions. That's a fair approach, and probably the safe one. But the ethics of pedophile hunting are back in the spotlight in the era of short-form social media videos, a direct legacy of the template Hansen built and America couldn't stop watching.
"Primetime" could have gone a step further and taken a sharper stance on where this kind of entertainment stops doing good and starts going off the rails.
Dace Potas, a law student, is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY. Follow him on X: @DacePotas
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Was 'To Catch a Predator' worth it? 'Primetime' won't say | Opinion
