Primetime (2026)

The most interesting thing about Chris Hansen is that he is arguably as much of a monster as the monsters he became famous for chasing — a man whose weird charisma and thirst for recognition led to his becoming at once the most outré and most mainstream peddler of true crime nightmare fuel in a country that can’t help but guzzle that shit down in the name of justice/vigilance/our way of life. Primetime is interesting because it is about that man. I wish it was a little bit more about the kind of country that believes that a man like him is a hero, but there’s enough around the edges to make it more than just a(n admittedly excellent) showcase of Robert Pattinson’s particular skill for playing well-manicured sociopaths who claim to care about the public good.

Whether or not the film goes astray in some of its choices regarding the very real suicide Hansen’s pursuit of television ratings leads to isn’t anything new. I like the choices Lance Oppenheim and Ajon Singh make for the sake of cinema, but in leaving the story intentionally incomplete, they leave the question at its core half-asked. The Chris Hansen of Primetime manages to convince himself that what he is doing has a higher moral purpose than rising up the ranks at NBC, which is well and good, but what about us, the viewer, who was so taken by this crusade that To Catch a Predator landed a slot in primetime, competing against the likes of Lost?

It’s bold to end the film where it ends, but if you’re the sort of person who goes to the sources after the credits of a film with an adapted screenplay rolls, it’s a bit of a shame. The film’s depiction of To Catch a Predator as a runaway success that its network didn’t understand and other networks pursued elides that there was a ton of hand-wringing about the show before it was cancelled in the wake of Louis Conradt’s suicide. Its extra-legal setup may have been beloved by the kind of culture warriors who wear “kill your local pedophile” shirts in public, but there’s a lot left unsaid about To Catch a Predator that’s at least arguably more interesting than one of its decoys’ quests to obtain a SAG card, like the number of cops the show busted, or how citizens who lived in the cities that hosted the sting houses weren’t always thrilled to have Hansen in town, or the various things that spiraled out of Conradt’s suicide: the fact that the show aired, the wrongful death lawsuit, the investigations into the show’s ethics by other news programs, how the city manager who approved the sting was fired, and an absurd amount of crazy shit about Murphy’s police chief, Billy Myrick, who was enthusiastic to work with Perverted Justice and To Catch a Predator after the civil forfeiture in the wake of a sting netted him a Ford Expedition for personal use, who was fired by the new city manager after the Conradt debacle, and who, of course, wound up being the chief of police in another Texas town soon thereafter, retiring without having faced consequence.

Some of the choices Oppenheim made for the sake of cinema are outright bad, too. Billy Myrick is a white man, as stereotypical a cop as they come, but in the course of adaptation he becomes Courtland Gunn, a David Clarke-esque sheriff played by Bokeem Woodbine. To Catch a Predator‘s topline executive producer was David Corvo, whose active role in making Dateline a true crime franchise suggests that he did, indeed, know what he was doing and was not merely responding to unknown market forces. The Texas operation was not a shitshow thrown together at the expense of another planned shoot in the Jersey Shore and held together by the sheer force of will of a lone female producer, but was basically normal until the call was made to send SWAT to Conradt’s home.

It’s fun, admittedly, to see someone from the haggard NBC producer lineage that produced Liz Lemon struggle to reign in the Ahab-esque Hansen as he literally hunts for a whale, but it’s not true, and given that the high cost of “the truth” is the crux of the long-running debate about the societal good or ill represented here by To Catch a Predator but writ large involves every branch of American media, from the titans of the fourth estate to the bustling industry of oopy spoopy podcasts run by amateur sleuths to social media algorithms that propagate wild-eyed conspiracy theories that would give even this film’s Chris Hansen some pause, Primetime is exactly the kind of film where the truth should take priority over the good story it tells, especially considering how much more interesting the truth is than the conclusion this film reaches.