FF '26: Primetime

There has recently been a renewed fascination with Chris Hansen’s To Catch a Predator, which aired from 2004-2007. This makes sense given the 20-year nostalgia cycle and millennials’ ongoing reckoning with all the batshit television we were exposed to at a young age. Just a year ago, David Osit debuted his documentary about the To Catch a Predator phenomenon with his revelatory documentary, Predators. So it tracks that another documentarian, Lance Oppenheim, would want to tackle the tricky legacy of the megahit TV show. Albeit, this time as a docudrama starring Robert Pattinson and Merritt Wever. Like Osit before him, Oppenheim tries to get inside the psyche of Chris Hansen during his reign as the king of gotcha television. Primetime does its best to showcase the warped, go-for-broke nature of the TV show, behind the scenes and in front of the camera. It does well as a portrait of a time period that valued sensationalized entertainment above all else. But when all is said and done, it doesn’t really help us to understand Chris Hansen or his infamous show anymore than we already did. Maybe that’s the point. The reason that Chris Hansen’s show continues to fascinate all these years later is because it is so insane that it ever existed in the first place. Hansen is a strange man that created one of the most infamous reality TV shows of the 2000s. Primetime is a fascinating and fantastical retelling of the making of a show that leaves a queasy feeling in the stomach of so many viewers.

Primetime begins with Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) and To Catch a Predator at the height of their fame in 2006. The show is poised for a primetime slot on NBC and Hansen desperately wants it to win an Emmy. So desperately in fact, he seems to lose sight of anything else important. His wife Mary (Anna Faris), is out of patience for her husband’s anti-child-predator crusade and his kids don’t seem to care at all that their dad is on TV. Meanwhile, he is doing a poor job of trying to end his affair with a young woman named Krysten (Caroline Hebert). All of this is background noise to Hansen though, as he continues chasing after child predators and a larger TV audience. His longtime producer Andie Bender (the incomparable Merritt Wever) enables him on his quixotic journey to catch all the predators, while starting to have her own doubts about where this is all going. After all, how long can you keep an audience when you just keep doing the same thing over and over again? People get bored and move on to the next hot TV show. Hansen seems aware of this, and his dwindling Emmy chances, and decides he needs to catch his biggest predator yet, his “whale”. And with this, Primetime begins its fantastical retelling of an insane show and the unhinged host behind it. 

Robert Pattinson’s performance as Hansen is an absolute blast. He imbues the character with a quiet manic energy that is impossible to look away from. Yes, he is handsome and charismatic. He is also ambitious to the point of ruthlessness. Pattinson understands that this is a man who has largely lost sight of his initial crusade to bring an end to child predators, and is now just in search of bigger ratings. Whether or not that’s actually true about the real Chris Hansen, that is what Pattinson and Oppenheim want us to think. This is a story about unchecked ambition in the pursuit of some unreachable apex of television stardom. Also, Pattinson’s impression of Hansen’s voice and mannerisms is wonderfully weird and hilarious. His monologues to his co-workers about the importance of their show are as funny as they are informative about what kind of guy this is. Primetime’s Chris Hansen is a ridiculous narcissist who will stop at nothing to get what he wants. It is a perfect caricature that works very well for this kind of hyperbolic movie.

Oppenheim shoots this film as if it were a fever dream. The scenes are frantic, blown-out, and uncomfortably close. All of this works together to move the story toward its violent, tragic conclusion. Those familiar with the show’s history will see the ending coming, but it’s best not spoiled either way. As the film builds toward Hansen finally catching his “whale” of a predator, we see the impacts it has on those directly in his orbit. Skyler Gisondo gives an especially heartbreaking turn as Dan Plump, one of the decoys hired to the show to pretend to be a child luring the predators to his home. Plump is just a young, aspiring actor looking for a steady gig, but instead he finds himself way in over his head as just another cog in Hansen’s grand crusade against the perverts of the world. Gisondo’s earnest performance as Plumb is both funny and devastating – which this movie so often is. As the character who is brand new to the To Catch A Predator production, we see his shock and horror at being thrust into the line of fire with the real life predators he lured to set. Plumb’s dream of being a legitimate actor craters along with Hansen’s quest for the ultimate predator catch. Gisondo's naturally sweet face and demeanor sell this well, and make his arc all the more tragic to watch.

While the film doesn’t necessarily say anything new about Chris Hansen or To Catch a Predator, it still makes for a fascinating watch. It’s funny and unnerving in all the ways you want something like this to be. Oppenheim seems to understand his audience are people just like him, people that are fascinated with Chris Hansen and his show but can’t fully pin down why. Just like the original show’s audience from 2004-2007, we are still perplexed and horrified by these child predators, but we are also fascinated and confounded by the team that thought televising these men’s arrests was doing God’s work. There is something about Chris Hansen and his show that never quite sat well, despite its well-intentioned MO, and that comes through loud and clear with Primetime. 

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