Kids learn a popular comeback early in the schoolyard: “Takes one to know one!” No bully epitomizes the meaning of that idiom, without actually grasping its significance, than disgraced journalist Chris Hansen. The former To Catch a Predator investigator gets the Network treatment in Primetime, Lance Oppenheim’s taut study of Hansen’s hugely popular and highly problematic trash TV hit. Played by Robert Pattinson in a tour-de-force performance, Hansen’s icky ways belie his seemingly altruistic principles.
Primetime dramatizes Hansen’s methodology for ferreting out perceived pedophiles with “gotcha!” shock television. His all-out bastardization of primetime television is the sensational fodder of which the likes of Diana Christensen, Faye Dunaway’s ambitious programming exec in Network could only dream. But as with The Howard Beale Show and its button-pushing histrionics, the tabloid sleaze of To Catch a Predator clicks with audiences.
The film looks at the inner workings of To Catch a Predator as aspiring actor Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo) get a too-good-to-be-true TV role. He receives nary a script nor direction. He just arrives at an ordinary house at an assigned time. His role is the decoy. He pretends to be a 13-year-old boy ready to meet the older man with whom he was trading saucy exchanges on instant messaging. It’s an impressive performance as Dan improvises to fulfill the hungry mark’s desires.
As Hansen waltzes into the room and catches the targeted adult, he throws out his signature “have a seat” line that somehow summons authority. The men surprisingly obey. Many plead with him not to have their transgressions unfold on television. Yet without any legal authority, Hansen gets the men to spill everything and admit their crimes. The teary admissions usually precede a needlessly aggressive arrest from the cops waiting outside. What’s bad for civil rights proves great for primetime TV.
Chasing ratings and seeing Emmys in his eyes, the popularity of the show validates the unethical practices behind Hansen’s dodgy design. But his ultimate downfall is his failure to understand the very men he interviews and recognize the fallibility of everyday people, just like himself.
Comparisons to David Osit’s hot mess of a documentary Predators are inevitable, but Primetime takes a much different approach. Oppenheim and screenwriter Ajon Singh favour a moral fable and psychological character piece, whereas Osit’s doc probes the (il)legality and ethics of Hansen’s practice. The films play nicely as companion pieces, in part because both works have limited perspectives. They’re two parts of a whole.
For one, Primetime doesn’t get into the weeds about the obvious acts of entrapment entailed in To Catch a Predator. Nor does it really worry about the fact that Hansen’s approach of trying men in the court of public opinion impedes justice rather than delivering it. There’s an implied sense of thwarted justice, though, as Hansen works with the citizen vigilante group Perverted-Justice and hires nubile adult actors to pose as underage jailbait. His show runs feeds salacious fear-mongering that America’s cities and suburbs are rife with sickos, but the investigations are blatantly self-serving. (Note the volunteer who enjoys lots of porn when he isn’t posing as a kid in chat rooms.) What Hansen fails to realize, though, is that it takes one to know one. He’s the ultimate predator and his perverted sense of virtue blinds him to the journalistic truth of his own stories.
Oppenheim’s own eye for documentary, honed in works like Some Kind of Heaven, creates a great backstage drama. Mixing grungy late 2000s’ video and the regrettable styles of the era, Primetime makes a period piece from the heyday of trash TV. The film harkens back to the days when the golden age of primetime sitcoms like Seinfeld and Friends was over. Network shows were becoming more conceptual as audiences and creators flocked to cable giants like HBO. Cue the cheapo dawn of reality TV. To Catch a Predator becomes the natural brainchild of network serials after the explosion of Survivor means that Law & Order spinoffs are the only bastion of recognizable primetime TV.
The film ingeniously blends Hansen’s own panache for liberally mixing fact with fiction. He works with producer Andy Bender (Merritt Weaver) to stage convincing scenes for crimes that wouldn’t really exist if he wasn’t paying actors to misrepresent themselves. Primetime latches onto this creative license via a true-ish story of Hansen’s extramarital activities. The film shifts an affair of Hansen’s back a few years as he finds himself embroiled in a looming National Enquirer story. The man known for catching guys on tape ironically gets busted by hidden cameras trailing him as he satisfies his urges.
Primetime obviously doesn’t make false equivalences between infidelity and pedophilia, but Pattinson’s complicated performance creates a man consumed by his urges and drives, yet conflicted by his fast-and-loose conceptions of morality. Pattinson captures Hansen’s icy voice and clipped air of authority as the host puts on a show with his targets, but creates a man wrestling with ambitions and overwhelming inadequacies beneath the surface. He conveys how connects with the men on the show because, seemingly, he unconsciously relates to them so well.
However, Hansen’s near-sociopathic lack of empathy breeds considerable harm. Primetime zeroes in on a story that brought To Catch a Predator to worst-case-scenario terrain. But beyond the ruined lives of the men in the show, the film sees collateral damage all around Hansen.
The film features two psychologically rich performances by Gisondo and Weaver as Hansen’s collaborators. Dan and Andy face moral reckonings of their own, yet they’re perverted by the monstrous success Hansen promises. Dan actually becomes a victim of the sexual violence that Predator seeks to curtail. One mark exposes himself to the actor on his first day. Gisondo nimbly conveys Dan’s sense of violation as he puts on a brave face for the job. But he soldiers on with a kind of Stockholm syndrome. He goes all-in, shaving his chest and committing to the bit while imbuing Hansen’s warped of moral authority to lend a little more conviction to his wide-eyed twinks who set each episode in motion.
Meanwhile, Andy recognizes the unethical terrain the production navigates, while Chris’s increasingly erratic practices and unchecked ambitions undermine her authority on set. She’s ready for an exit, but becomes the Laureen Hobbs figure of this contemporary Network fable—a principled woman undone by shares and ratings. But if all we want from life is “a 30 share and a 20 rating,” to steal another line from Diana Christensen, it’s hard to tell who the real sickos are in the Predator fable. What once was satire is now reality.
