Robert Pattinson plays Chris Hansen in a film out today. It is the second project in about a year to go back to To Catch a Predator and ask what exactly America was watching.
The film
Primetime is an A24 narrative feature directed by Lance Oppenheim, in theaters September 25, 2026.
It is not a biopic in the ordinary sense. Reporting describes it as a dark meditation on performance, media and morality, closer to a fever dream than a life story.
The documentary that came first
Predators, directed by David Osit, premiered at Sundance in January 2025 and was released theatrically that September by MTV Documentary Films. It holds a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and was a New York Times Critics’ Pick.
Osit was one of the millions who watched the show, and was disturbed by watching it as entertainment. The film:
- Shows raw unaired footage.
- Interviews Hansen.
- Interviews the adult actors who played the teenage decoys.
- Traces the copycats who turned the format into open vigilantism.
What the show was
To Catch a Predator ran on NBC from 2004 to 2007, as a segment of Dateline. Decoys posed as minors online, men arrived at a house, and Hansen walked out with transcripts.
It was enormously popular. It also ended badly. In 2006 a Texas prosecutor, Louis Conradt, shot himself as police and a camera crew arrived at his home. His family sued NBC and the case was settled.
The show did not return after that.
The BeezLoop Take
Let us be clear about what these men were doing, because the revisionism runs both ways. They were arriving at houses expecting to meet children. Sympathy for them is not the point of either film and should not be the takeaway from this one.
The question the films actually raise is about us. A network built a hit show out of filming the worst moment of someone’s life, monetized it with ad breaks, and audiences watched it the way they watched sitcoms. The catching was real police work. The lingering close-up on a man’s face as he understood what was happening was not police work. That was the product, and tens of millions of people bought it weekly.
Conradt is the part that cannot be argued away. A man killed himself with cameras outside his door, NBC was sued, the case settled, and the show ended. Whatever you think he deserved, no court had said it yet, and a television producer is not supposed to be the one who decides. That is the whole case against the format in one incident.
The copycats are the legacy that actually matters now, and they are worse. The show taught a generation that confronting a suspected predator on camera is both righteous and lucrative, and the people doing it today have no lawyers, no police coordination and no editorial standards. Some have gotten the wrong man. Some have gotten people hurt. That is not an unintended consequence of the format, it is the format without the network’s liability department attached.
Two films in a year suggests the culture is finally ready to look at this, roughly twenty years late, which is about the normal lag. Worth asking what we are doing right now that will get the same treatment in 2046.
The question
Was To Catch a Predator journalism, law enforcement, or entertainment wearing both as a costume? And if the answer is the third, what does it say that it was one of the most popular things on television?
Related: more than half of people now post less than they used to, and what happens when bodycam footage becomes the whole story.
Sources: ABC News · Washington Times · Variety on the documentary · Film Forum
