Fudging history makes Primetime a better movie & a worse argument

I saw Primetime, the new movie about NBC’s To Catch A Predator, a couple nights ago. It was a “good time,” a stunning look through ”the drama” of making a TV show that truly brought “water for elephants.” These are all the names of Robert Pattinson movies. He plays Chris Hansen. I'm already down for whatever Pattinson does, but this really was one of the better performances I saw in a movie this year. Give the man a medal. Everybody should see Primetime, including “the boy and the heron.”

I’m going to make an argument about the movie here, but I first want to say it‘s terrific as a film. I didn’t expect it to be so funny, but it was. Eric Rahill makes a surprise (to me) appearance and I hope this leads to more movie things for him. Jeremy Levick stole a scene in Pattinson’s previous A24 dark comedy and Rahill steals a few in this one, so maybe when Pattinson returns to A24 to make a movie with somebody like Ari Aster, they should get a supporting role for Dan Licata and/or Ana Fabrega. This is my design.

Pattinson's getting a ton of attention for this, and he deserves it, but the whole thing's perfectly cast. Merritt Wever and Skyler Gisondo are slowly revealed as the story's other two leads and I already knew I loved Wever, but it turns out Gisondo is just as good. His next two movies are Focker-In-Law and Shrek 5 and I hope he winds up cast in something a human being would actually want to watch after that. Bokeem Woodbine isn’t around for much of Primetime but whenever he’s on screen, you're watching a very good case for him being in more comedies.

The real reason Pattinson deserves awards for this, if anybody deserves awards for art, is his ability to do a dead-on impression of Hansen without making that the extent of his presence. Plenty of people could do the voice and facial tics, but this isn’t a Gary Oldman performance, where that’s the whole deal. He isn’t letting his posture and the shock of “Hey hold up, that isn’t what that actor normally sounds like!” carry him through to the Oscars podium. There is a specific person in there under what could have been an SNL caricature. At one point, Hansen tells Gisondo's decoy character something to the effect of "Nothing I do is acting," and that's what Pattinson nails: he's portraying a person who's built up so many layers of artifice that he honestly seems to believe he's sincere. If you hooked Pattinson's version of Chris Hansen up to a lie-detector test, he could pass while telling you literally anything. In the film's most uncomfortably funny joke, Pattinson raises a finger gun to the sky, slowly brings it down to point at Gisondo's crotch and says, overenunciating as always, "cock." And then he explains what he means. But if one of the characters around him had asked why he was being so over the top, you know Hansen would respond with "What are you talking about?"

One more note before we get into the meat of the thing: There’s a weird casting gimmick here I can’t figure out. I would be surprised if it was coincidental, and I haven't seen anybody mention it, but three of the most prominent predators are played by former child/teen actors. The first guy they bust is Tony Revolori, who was in his first TV show at 10, his feature at 13 and really broke out at 18 with The Grand Budapest Hotel. He was playing high schooler Flash Thompson in the Spider-Man movies as recently as 2021. The second predator, the one who sprays whipped cream on his dick, is Jonathan Lipnicki, who became a star at 6 with Jerry Maguire. He was in movies like Stuart Little and The Little Vampire before he turned 10. And then the final predator, Bill Conradt, who kills himself, is Alex Winter, who started a little later but who got big in his early 20s playing high school kids in Lost Boys and the Bill and Ted movies. All three actors have continued working past the point where they’re portraying teenagers, but I think it’s fair to say we associate them with their kid and teen roles. Is Primetime using them to say something about shattered innocence or how the media treats young people? I have no idea. Maybe I’m reaching.

To Catch A Predator has been fascinating to me for a long time. I can actually tell you it's been 19 years, because Esquire published Luke Dittrich's piece "Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die" in September 2007. This is the story Primetime is adapting, and you should give it a read. Its subhead is a beautiful piece of journalistic poetry that might verge on being too dramatic if it wasn't the truth: "NBC's To Catch A Predator arrived in Murphy, Texas, to conduct a sting operation. The only honest thing that followed was the gunshot."

My knowledge of the Predator world largely comes from that story and from David Osit's 2025 documentary Predators (currently streaming on Paramount+). I'm not claiming to be an expert, just somebody who's listened to them. Going off those sources and basic internet research, the two biggest changes Primetime makes to the Chris Hansen story are

1. The movie has the National Enquirer discovering Hansen having an affair and exposing it to the world in 2006. I don't doubt Hansen was cheating on his wife for years, but in the real world, the Enquirer got its pictures and published its story in 2011.
2. There's a bit of magical realism where Pattinson leaves the Texas sting house, walks into the street and opens the door of an idling car, only to find it empty. The next time everybody looks for the car, it's vanished.

The reasons you make these changes for your movie are clear. You compress the timeline to get the affair revelation and the Conradt debacle happening concurrently to up the tension. In the film, Pattinson's drawn to the Texas case because Perverted Justice, the people who spend all day having cyber sex with potential pedophiles in order to lure them in, have a lead on a guy who'll turn out to be Conradt, and they believe he's politically connected. And that's true. Dittrich wrote:

In the two years since the first episode of "To Catch a Predator" aired, Chris Hansen had exposed men from a variety of professions. A doctor. A handful of soldiers. A couple of cops. Teachers. A rabbi. A minister. But he'd never exposed a prosecutor before.

The Perverted Justice employee rubbed his hands together, clapped them, obviously energized by the news he was imparting.

Chris Hansen's usual on-camera listening expression – lips tight, eyes slightly narrowed, just the hint of a furrow to his brow – did not change.

Primetime also depicts Hansen as interested in fishing for Conradt, who he keeps calling "the whale." In the film, this is partly because landing such a big story would distract from Hansen's issues. If he can get Conradt, Hansen's wife will see how good a guy he is, his kids will respect him, the ratings will get a boost and the last thing anybody will care about is whether a woman who isn't his spouse was sucking his thumb in a hotel restaurant.

I really love the moment in Primetime when Hansen's wife (Anna Faris) learns about his infidelity and asks how old the other woman is. She knows her husband as well as anybody does and still, in her mind, there's a chance he's also a pedophile. You can think about that moment a long time.

But I think giving Hansen another reason to so recklessly throw himself at the Texas sting does a little too much to let him off the hook. It makes it seem like the guy's professionalism was slipping because he was in a tight spot in his personal life, when really, Hansen was at the same level of professionalism the entire time. He was chasing ratings because he thought creating popular TV made him somebody worthy of hero worship. The movie acknowledges that and I wish it stayed there, rather than going a little too far and wondering whether he was getting wilder because his back was to the wall. The real Hansen's motivations are more complex than an attempt to run interference on his personal failures.

The bit with the car is different, in that most people probably won't think it actually took place. It seems more like a filmic flourish, some kind of symbol. And as that, I think it's fine. When Hansen marches into the street and opens the car door, though, he blows his cover, and we pretty quickly see the film crew discover a Craigslist post warning of a camera crew hiding in their little Texas suburb. By approaching the car, Hansen lets the world know where he's doing Chris Hansen things.

And that takes away a little bit of Conradt's agency. We'll never know exactly why, but in the real world, Conradt chose to stop chatting with Perverted Justice's imaginary teen boy and deleted the account he'd been writing from. It was a decision he made on his own, without getting spooked he was falling into a trap. When Primetime sends Hansen out of cover and the bait house is blown, it becomes possible Conradt was withdrawing not because he had second thoughts about his own conduct but because he thought he was vulnerable to getting caught.

When I say I'm fascinated by To Catch A Predator, a lot of that comes down to the true nuance you need in discussing it. The people they were filming in these segments were doing terrible things. In the worst scenarios, they would have committed acts I can safely call evil. There's no defending it. And when you consider different aspects of Predator, you don't get into defending pedophiles, you get into questions about what we'll consume as entertainment and how we'll celebrate it. And then right below that level are discussions about entrapment and right below that are discussion of how often rape is a crime of opportunity. People are likely to know their abuser and it's possible a certain kind of person wouldn't assault an 11-year-old if they weren't in a situation where an 11-year-old was reaching out to them, instant messaging about wanting sex and describing what they wanted to have done to them. It gets hard to properly assess a crime of opportunity when the ostensible good guys are explicitly creating opportunities. I don't think you or I would react the way the people on To Catch A Predator reacted, I'm not saying we're all one step away from bringing a six pack to a lonely middle school kid, I'm not saying these people are innocent. I'm saying that in clarifying why To Catch A Predator was a net negative, we have to think about what justice, punishment and complicity are.

That Esquire article really opened my eyes to a lot of this. I was a subscriber at the time, I was 18-years-old, and I didn't watch To Catch A Predator but I also didn't think it was too gross and I didn't immediately understand why Luke Dittrich would write about it the way he did, in a big magazine respected for its longform journalism. It's similar to the realization so many of us have with the death penalty, where we think nothing of it because of course murder is the worst thing you can do, why shouldn't you be killed in turn, and then you read about what it means to execute somebody in retaliation or you look at the probability an innocent person is killed, you explore theories around restorative justice and why we have life sentences at all if we think prison is an effective tool for rehabilitation, you see that the Sackler family is still out here, free and loaded, funding art shows, and how we treat different kinds of people differently. You think "people should be punished for their crimes but probably not by shooting poison into their bodies."

I worked for a prison reform nonprofit for a while and I talked to dozens of incarcerated people. There was a long period where one particular prison we had two correspondents in was only supplying its jailed with brown water. This feels a little like a name drop, but I hope you'll understand why I'm doing it. One of the people we worked with was Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is famous and who was convicted of killing a cop, and there were months where he wasn't given a change of clothes. He was in the same crusty, dirty jumpsuit for something like half a year, and you can assume that was partly due to prison being hell and partly due to who he was and why he was in prison. And he had been sentenced to death (and then life in prison, once the death penalty was dropped), but he hadn't been sentenced to a life of living in his own filth. If you tell me a person who robbed a liquor store should go to jail, okay, sure, but the judge who handled their case didn't set the punishment to include constant infections and organ damage from drinking sewer water. The sentence did not include having all correspondence with the outside world taken away because your mail gets confiscated and you aren't allowed to use the phone.

You can probably tie a lot of my thoughts on this stuff to Dittrich's article asking if Bill Conradt should have been pushed to suicide. That's the seed for so much of it for me, when I was barely an adult: Should this person who did a bad thing still be alive?

The bit I think about most in Dittrich's piece doesn't have anything to do with Conradt. He writes about Detective Jimmy Patterson, who NBC paid to help ensure safety during the stings:

Detective Patterson had worked for a suburban Dallas-metro-area police department for the last twenty-two years, had spent the last twelve of those years on SWAT, knew his tactics, knew his weapons. And he knew that Murphy was just a small town, with a population of ten thousand, and so you couldn't expect all the cops in Murphy to be as well trained as he was. They didn't have the resources. But still. How hard was it to avoid a cross-fire situation? Because that's what he saw on those little gray-scale monitors every time an arrest was made: cross-fire situations. The cops on the Takedown Team would rush the suspect and surround him, guns leveled, and Detective Patterson winced when he saw it, because he knew that if those officers ever had to actually fire their weapons, well, they'd be just as likely to kill one another as the suspect. Sometimes he'd get a view right down the barrel of a Murphy cop's gun, a perspective straight out of Doom, courtesy of a Dateline buttonhole camera, and in the same shot he'd get a view of another cop's back.

Not to mention that the whole intensity level of these arrests, the way the Takedown Team would holler at the suspect, the way they'd throw him to the ground, the whole idea of even having their weapons drawn in the first place, all of that struck Detective Patterson as ridiculous. Just the other day, he'd been in a supermarket parking lot when he noticed someone who fit the description of a suspect in a bank robbery he'd been working. He called the sergeant, told him to send over some of the boys. And when his colleagues got there, you know how many guns were drawn, how much shouting was done? None. The officers walked up, introduced themselves, asked the guy to show some ID, and that was that. Sure, they had their holsters unsnapped, one hand near, but they didn't need to take it to the next level. You hardly ever have to, not in the real world. All that business—the guns, the tackling, the shouting—struck Detective Patterson as pure and simple TV: It might look good on camera, but if you're letting a camera influence how you do your takedowns, you've got a problem.

I thought about that early in Primetime, when a cop in a ghillie suit emerges from a suburban lawn to tackle a predator. The police officers in Primetime are ridiculous in that way, though you don't see any of them unthinkingly point loaded shotguns at their buddies.

This isn't a problem of fudging history, but of scope: Primetime doesn't acknowledge how To Catch A Predator has continued. For that, you'll need to watch Osit's Predators. The To Catch A Predator segments ended in 2006, but Hansen continued a few years longer at Dateline, hosting To Catch A Con Man and To Catch An I.D. Thief. He started Hansen vs. Predator with Crime Watch Daily and ran it for three years, and then he went to YouTube and Discover+ and he started a podcast where he reviews old Predator segments and since 2025, he's been streaming on a true crime service called TruBlu. He's never stopped.

He's also influenced a rash of streamers who are even less diligent in identifying criminals. Predators has a grim stretch about a YouTuber named Kenneth Chambers, who calls himself "Skeet Hansen" and runs stings out of motel rooms. None of what he does is legally actionable and police aren't involved, so he just gets people on camera, says "You've been Skeeted," and lets them go, whether he has proof of their misdeeds. Sites like Twitch are full of influencers with catchphrases doing illegal things to identify people they think are doing illegal things.

Toward the end of Primetime, Merritt Wever's producer character is courted by an ABC exec who wants to get her on What Would You Do? This is the show where a crew set up an uncomfortable public situation, i.e. a mom loudly calls her daughter fat at a restaurant, and when a real person steps in to say something, John Quinones comes out and congratulates them. The ABC exec in Primetime admits What Would You Do? is a riff on To Catch A Predator, but she frames it as a positive spin on the formula. You show people being good instead of people being bad. Whatever problems I have with What Would You Do?, the character is correct. The problem is Primetime makes it seem like What Would You Do? is the future, that Hansen's show gets taken off air but Quinones' survives. Again, this is true. But getting demoted from NBC to YouTube isn't that raw of a deal anymore. And plenty of people who never could have reached the point where they were hosting NBC shows are starting their own shows online with nothing but their phone cameras and wi-fi.

This isn't Primetime failing. I don't expect a great movie to turn into an encyclopedia entry on the ensuing two decades of its core concepts. The movie is very good. It's just that I really hope people who see it don't get to the credits and think "jeez, glad that's all behind us." This wasn't a couple years in the mid 00s when everybody lost their minds. Primetime covers the most visible spike in a mindset that's still screwing with people's sense of justice today.