In what is becoming a common trend of reevaluating 2000s-era TV, Primetime is the first major non-documentary/docuseries to attempt tackling some of the more problematic aspects of the genre in that decade. This following the likes of Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model and The Swan: Behind the Mirror, both of which shed new light on how, well, fucked up reality TV could be back in the days of the “Wild West” when it was just starting out. To Catch a Predator was one of many reality shows that enjoyed the benefit of airing during what was still considered “early era” reality TV, premiering in 2004 (though it initially began as a smaller segment on Dateline NBC called Dangerous Web—get the double meaning there?).
It quickly became an undeniable sensation, peaking in popularity and culture saturation by 2006 (see: the season one 30 Rock episode, “The Break-Up”), which is where director Lance Oppenheim, in his narrative feature debut, begins the tale. During the year of The Hills, the “Holy Trinity” paparazzi photo of Paris, Britney and Lindsay and, as Primetime would like to remind, the year of Fergie’s debut solo album, The Dutchess. For “London Bridge,” with its perfect-for-someone-who-knows-they’re-fucked “oh shit, oh shit” intro, is the first song that plays after the opening scene of Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson, racking up yet another Oscar-worthy performance) gearing up to, what else, catch a predator in Long Beach. And while there were two episodes of the show that filmed there (both of which aired in early 2007), Singh and Oppenheim use a composite-type structure to create the initial scene of Hansen “catching” his man.
And to prepare for that “catch,” the stylized (though who’s to say Hansen didn’t do something similar?) opening to Primetime has Pattinson-as-Hansen staring stoically into the mirror as he recites lines from the printed-out pages of the salacious chats this predator had with what he thought was an underage girl (there will also be plenty of predators who instead prefer underage boys). So it is that the viewer is subjected to seeing Hansen read lines like, “I will undress you and you will undress me” as though they’re written down in a Shakespeare drama, for that’s the level of seriousness he brings to his “role.” And it is a role, one that he starts to have trouble differentiating from whatever his “real” self is supposed to be. Which can often be the trouble with “scripted reality TV,” a term that certainly feels as if it should qualify for being an oxymoron.
Portraying Hansen as someone who got lost in the “part” of playing a moralizing “vigilante” for justice, Pattinson and his filmmaking collaborators, Oppenheim and screenwriter Ajon Singh, capture the spirit of the post-9/11 climate, during which there was this sense Americans had of wanting to “claim justice” by “any means necessary.” And they appeared to relish seeing that done by “roguish” (and, of course, white male) types like Hansen and, that’s right, George W. Bush. Who was dealing with some of his own issues in 2006, losing big in the midterm elections and, with that loss, much of his power. This in no small part thanks to the Republican party being mired in scandal after scandal that year (and ostensibly every year). And one that particularly stood out in the To Catch a Predator era was the discovery of Congressman Mark Foley’s own sexually-charged instant messages to underage boys who were known to Foley through the congressional page program.
To be sure, in an alternate universe, it could just as easily have been Foley that Hansen homed in on for his show instead of Assistant District Attorney Bill Conradt (played here by Alex Winter a.k.a. Bill from Bill & Ted). The figure who becomes the “white whale” of Hansen’s imagination as Primetime continues and the success of the show increases the pressure to keep outdoing themselves. The “themselves” in that equation also including Hansen’s lead producer, Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), who is based at least in part on Lynn Keller. A hungry-for-ratings “ballbuster” to Hansen’s narcissistic cipher who’s desperate to prove he’s got as much “serious” value as Stone Phillips (Bill Heck). Indeed, the latter was as pervasive-seeming as Hansen during that period on NBC, even appearing on-camera to introduce the To Catch a Predator segment within the Dateline NBC universe. But, to Hansen’s dismay, his brand of “schlock” would never be seen by most, including the Primetime version of Phillips, as anything other than sensationalism. A.k.a. “appealing to the lowest common denominator.”
Though, to be sure, even the lowest common denominator—the predators themselves—would start to take issue with Hansen and his methods. His unique form of “journalism.” Which quite a few people were (and are) inclined to view as nothing more than entrapment. As is the case for a rabbi in Primetime that’s based on David Kaye, who appeared in the second episode, titled after the location, “Herndon, Fairfax County, Virginia.” The rabbi (Bob Ari) in Primetime is even credited as “Red BD,” the real-life screen name of Kaye in the chatrooms he would become immortalized by. However, unlike Kaye, the “Red BD” of the movie gets much more confrontational and violent, demanding of Hansen, “Who do you think you are?” The question laden with meaning. As in, “Who are you to be the judge and executioner of all these men?” And yet, Hansen, like many in America at the time, appears fairly certain he’s doing “the Lord’s work” by “cleansing the world of an ancient evil” (pedophilia, one assumes—not “being Muslim,” the other “evil” Americans and their government were hyper-focused on in the To Catch a Predator heyday).
But in his “cleansing,” Hansen himself becomes a predator by constantly stalking and observing these men, peering out through a curtain in the first scene before bursting forth like what Oppenheim calls a combination of “Jerry Maguire and Dracula.” Ready to go in for the kill. Or, more specifically, inflict death by public shame (death being very literal for Bill Conradt). And only further spurred by none other than Jeff Zucker, the president of NBC at the time, and the person who oversaw how the programming schedule would be laid out. Playing a so-called more “boorish version of himself” in the movie, Zucker tells Hansen point-blank that he doesn’t like To Catch a Predator. That, in fact, he can’t understand why audiences in general are suddenly showing far less interest in the “beautiful” scripted content they have lined up. But what he does understand are ratings. And when To Catch a Predator pulls in the kind of numbers that get his attention, he decides to move it to, you guessed it “primetime.” The hours of the night, as Hansen explains it to his children (during one of the few times he sees them), when the most people are watching TV. Yes, an unfathomable concept to the current generation, to whom “appointment TV” comes across as “ancient.” But, to put it in terms that “young people” can understand, primetime was as influential—if not more so—in molding American minds, across all generations, as social media is now.
To that point, in an interview with Frazier Tharpe for GQ, screenwriter Singh noted of this era of mass manipulation, “For Lance [Oppenheim] and I, it was an extremely formative time. I was nine or ten years old. We were extremely impressionable. We’re consuming everything on television, Jerry Springer, Oprah, To Catch a Predator, 20/20. Apple Jacks commercials. Every single piece of branding, commercialism, capitalism just absolutely drilling itself through your skull. The script is an exorcism, in a way, of all of these things from my body.”
And, when framed that way, oh, how Singh exorcises himself, further remarking to GQ of the impactful decade, “…it was a sort of terrifying period where media is transitioning out of the Seinfeld era, the Friends era, these network TV juggernauts, and people were trying to figure out what the next iteration of that looks like. And in a way, reality TV existed but I think To Catch a Predator was truly the beautiful amalgamation hybrid between scripted and non-scripted, and that’s echoed throughout the next decade until even now.” The “gotcha!” culture of the time also blatantly paved the way for the kind of “citizen journalism” going on at present, with everyone documenting the movements and actions of others to “police” them without even needing a badge.
But in those To Catch a Predator days, Hansen had styled himself as a lone “honorary” officer of the law, meting out justice one entrapped predator at a time. And, when presented through this new lens by Pattinson, Singh and Oppenheim, Hansen doesn’t exactly come out looking very “heroic.” Which isn’t to say that Primetime’s objective is to drum up some sort of retroactive sympathy for predators, but rather, to remind people that the lawlessness of media now (think: Perez Hilton’s attempted suicide going mostly uninterrupted on TikTok Live) is directly descended from an exploitative reality show like To Catch a Predator.
Richly enough, Hansen himself commented of Primetime that he felt it “exploit[s] the brand that I’ve built over the last forty-five years. You can decide whether that’s ethical or legal or identity theft or however you look at it. But it seems a little exploitive, as Hollywood often is.”
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