You wouldn’t think a simple three-word phrase could be so compelling, so menacing, so locked and loaded for generating humiliation. But every time Chris Hansen casually uttered, “Have a seat” to whomever was loitering inside a typical American house,
located in a typical American suburb, with a typical American police force waited outside to bust the person, you felt a chill go through your bones. To Catch a Predator began as a Dateline NBC segment and evolved — metastasized? — into a brand that gave birth to a cottage industry. The idea was simple: lure online pedophiles lurking in chat rooms to an in-person encounter with a decoy. Confront them when they show up. Roll cameras and broadcast the public shaming to the nation. “There used to be a pillory in every town,” the host declares. “Now there’s a television in every home.”
That sentiment is spoken by Robert Pattinson’s version of Hansen in Primetime, though who knows if the real Hansen felt compelled to articulate that notion on the way to celebrity. Or, for that matter, whether the grandfather of the Reality-Vigilante-TV Industrial Complex ever felt the level of fear and self-loathing that radiates off the star’s human-flop-sweat of a portrayal. Regardless, it’s a great buried-lede of a line, one of several that pops out in filmmaker Lance Oppenheim’s dramatization of To Catch a Predator‘s rise and moral free-fall. Oppenheim cut his teeth making documentaries that he’s described as “stranger than ‘stranger than fiction,'” casting his lens on sperm donors (Spermworld), retirement communities (Some Kind of Heaven, The Paradise Next Door), and power struggles among cosplayers (Ren Faire). Uncomfortability is his comfort zone, and he’s picked an oddly perfect subject for his first narrative feature: manufactured nonfiction that presented as righteousness and doubled as queasy entertainment. To answer the eternal TCAP question: Yes, he sees how this looks. And he’d like you to take a long, hard look at how and why this show imprinted on our collective imagination, for better or worse.
This isn’t the first time in recent years that To Catch a Predator has been put in the hot seat — Robert Osit’s excellent documentary Predators examined the phenomenon from a number of viewpoints, and let Hansen speak for himself. Primetime takes a different tack, focusing on the show’s opportunity to level up as it’s hitting the peak of its popularity and giving Pattinson a stage on which to rage. Performance is the throughline in more ways than one. When we meet Hansen, he’s trying out variations of the “gotcha” moments he’ll soon spring on one of the perps; the way Pattinson pronounces the word “lubricant” as if he’s savoring each syllable immediately sets the tone. The actor has specialized in live-action gargoyles in his post-Twilight period, and the gent is in his element here. This Hansen feels like a twitchy, touchy embodiment of true-crime ambition. Pattinson has the passive-aggressive cadence and trolling thunder of the real thing down pat, with more than a bit of fairy-tale troll thrown in for good measure. (You can understand why the actual TCAP host has, shall we say, a complicated relationship with this project.)
The show is already on its way to being a runaway hit when network head Jeff Zucker — played by Jeff Zucker, because he was available so why not? — dangles a golden carrot in front of Hansen and his perpetually gum-snapping producer Andie Bender (Merrit Wever, pure perfection). He wants to give To Catch a Predator a primetime slot on Sunday, against ABC’s Lost. Hansen is over the moon. The level-up may not shut up that smug Stone Phillips (Bill Heck), who coos that he’ll watch “from Afghanistan,” where he’s about to do real reporting on a war. But finally, the host thinks, his baby will get the kudos it deserves. The caveat is that TCAP has to start catching bigger fish. What they really need, Hansen thinks, is a whale.
Primetime gives you a gallery of showbiz grotesques and True Crime Inc. archetypes, from the way-too-into-it researcher (Matthew Maher) to the executive (Jessica Hecht) trying to poach Bender for a copycat series on a competing network. What the audience needs is a surrogate, which the movie delivers in the form of Dam Plumb (Licorice Pizza‘s Skylar Gisando). He’s an aspiring actor that auditions for a mystery gig, i.e. a 13-year-old boy used to entice pervs and creeps for these televised sting operations. “Decoy Dan,” as Hansen dubs him, isn’t sure about any of this, especially after he’s thrown in the deep end of the pool on his first day. But hey, work is work. The devil on his shoulder, Bender, keeps giving him the thumbs up. The angel on the other side, in the form of a fellow decoy with a conscience — what’s up, Phoebe Bridgers! — warns him that this will indeed take a toll on his soul. Meanwhile, a father figure who does not have the young man’s best interests at heart keeps saying he’s a superhero. When that metaphorical whale surfaces in Murphy, TX, the scene is set for a disaster.
Folks who are up on their To Catch a Predator history know what happens next, and it isn’t pretty. Primetime takes its sweet time in settling on a specific tone for the story it wants to tell: It’s not a satire, but it’s close. It’s not a straight bio-drama, but it’s close. It’s not a horror movie, but it’s really, really close. That last act finally fully commits to the third option, and you feel like Oppenheim and co. are mounting a full-court press against whatever subtlety that might be loitering on the periphery. Going for baroque is the only way to truly capture what the movie is about, however. TCAP shouldn’t be held for all of our collective sins as a society, of course. But in terms of where we’re at right now — the performative righteousness, the obsession over fame, the need to turn the worst aspects of humanity into the best entertainment money can buy — well, you can see how this looks, right? Primetime recounts how this show didn’t create a sense of collective bloodlust, it just rode a wave that was already there. Then it tells us we’re free to go, knowing what awaits us right outside the front door.
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