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# Primetime Is A Gorgeous, Sleazy Portrait Of Early 2000s TV
- URL: https://aftermath.site/primetime-hansen-review-impressions/
- Published: 2026-09-30T17:32:02.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-30T17:32:02.000Z
- Description: The fictionalized account of the rise and fall of Chris Hansen's "To Catch A Predator" explores the motivations underneath the show's justice-seeking premise
- Author: Riley MacLeod
- Tags: Afterchat, Movies, films, Primetime

The mythos of Chris Hansen and his early 2000s NBC show *To Catch A Predator* had a swift arc: Once an example of a kind of journalism-adjacent, exposé-meets-lurid-entertainment popular back then, the show was taken off the air not long [after a target of one of the show's stings killed himself](https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a3269/to-catch-a-predator/?ref=aftermath.site) as police and camera crews closed in. Hansen's attempts to remain relevant as a media personality and a crusader against child predation have [faced criticism](https://spitfirenews.com/p/chris-hansen-primetime-onision-dahvie-vanity?ref=aftermath.site), and now we have *Primetime*, a fictionalized account of Hansen's *Predator* days starring a wonderfully creepy Robert Pattinson. Chris and Riley saw the movie, and we're here to talk about it.

**Riley:** Hello, Chris! I made my dad take me to see *Primetime* at an uncomfortably small theater in Cape Cod, where there were about 10 of us there on a Monday night, all of which made the experience a bit more intimate than I think I was prepared for given its subject matter. Despite having to apologize to my dad for some of the dirty language Pattinson mutters to himself at the beginning and end, I really enjoyed the film. What about you?

**Chris:** *Primetime* rocks; of all the movies to recommend to a dad, this is probably movie of the year for me.

It's rare to see a trailer for a movie, think "wow, that looks really good" and have your expectations met and exceeded. Just a movie as menacing as the people it depicts.

**Riley:** Yeah, the trailers really sold it, especially Pattinson's take on Hansen's signature "Have a seat." 

One takeaway for me from all this has been that I didn't really know much about *To Catch A Predator*, and especially about what went into it all behind the scenes and about the death of Bill Conradt, an assistant district attorney in Texas who shot himself after Hansen and police came to his house when he didn't show up to Hansen's set. The whole show was just... really fucked up process-wise, and arguably [didn't even achieve the justice it claimed to](https://www.foxnews.com/story/texas-da-wont-prosecute-any-pedophiles-nabbed-in-nbc-predator-show.amp?ref=aftermath.site). I think *Primetime* exposes and explores all that without just being a two-hour dunk.

**Chris:** At its core, the movie is stylized like a neo-noir or a movie like *Network*. Yes, there's larger themes here which the movie gets into, but the heart of it is how selfish, self-serving and nasty these people are. Hansen's arc is bookended with him rehearsing the gruesome details he's about to say to the person he's snared on set, but it's no different than any other acting exercise. He's brutish and self-serving. He wakes his children up at one point in their Connecticut home to show them the lastest episode of *Predator*, and when his wife comes in he lies and says they stumbled in. Even the people who orbit around him are grotesque and self-centered, and Merritt Wever steals the show as his producer. 

**Riley:** I think the movie does a good job of showing that Hansen and company aren't strictly motivated by good intentions, but at the same time it doesn't then compare that to the people who end up on the show because they've been having dirty online chats with people they think are kids. There's a plotline about the *National Enquirer* threatening to expose an extra-marital affair Hansen is having, and I thought the movie handled that well by highlighting Hansen's hypocrisy but not being like, well everyone is equally bad.

**Chris:** There's a funny beat where someone asks Hansen how old the woman is and he goes "thirty."

Yeah, the film isn't going to say "hey, let's give it up for pedophiles," or even suggest that these people were innocent, but rather focuses on the fact that this is first and foremost spectacle and not justice. At one point a rabbi who is caught in a predator sting looks Hansen in the eyes; the two of them are locked in a surreal, other worldly space and the rabbi goes "Who gave you the right?" and that's what the keystone of this entire movie.

Also, the movie is the most 2006 a movie can possibly be, and while there are some anachronisms that I'm willing to grant the filmmakers, the point is that this was in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Hansen is a demon, and at one point Stone Phillips condescends to Hansen by saying that he's going to be watching his show in Afghanistan, but can you honestly say that *To Catch A Predator* was morally worse than what the media did to cheerlead those invasions? Isn't it true that those are cut from the same cloth, taken from the same impulse? Who gave them the right?

**Riley:** Right. The movie does kind of delve into this through the character of Dan Plum, a young actor who gets cast on the show to pretend to be the teens the predators are chatting with online. He's really torn about whether the whole thing is an acting job--there's a great scene where he talks about this with Hansen, who says Plum isn't an actor, he's a "superhero"--but the way everything blurs the line between journalism or exposé and entertainment, and between police work and entertainment, are all complexities that stand counter to the ways Hansen and the [Perverted Justice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverted-Justice?ref=aftermath.site) people (the organization that found the predators online and got them to come to the *Predator* sets) seem to want to see things in black and white.

The movie also wants to *look* like the early 2000s, with the grainy footage and leaky colors. I'm not a Film Guy so don't tend to really have strong feelings on that, but I did think the movie was really good-looking.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/30/f5/30f5b1bb-84ee-4c26-b446-fb9a5e512994/content/images/2026/09/bft_lp_rec709_g24_3840x2160_0127422--1-.jpg)

A24

**Chris:** My favorite part about Dan, who ends up being known as "Decoy Dan" by Hansen, is the scene of him getting into the role of a teenage boy by watching the [*Sling Blade* episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAO7ugWjL1U&ref=aftermath.site) of *Inside The Actors Studio*. Like, that film has aged horribly and so you have this beat of him patterning his performance to lure in pedophiles with footage of Billy Bob Thornton trying to "find the voice" in the most 2006 way possible.

Also speaking to how the movie looks, the cinematographer specifically used a lens meant to look like a vintage lens (Hawk V‑Lite Vintage⁠ '74) and so a lot of this movie has this soft, 70s look to it that contrasts with the TV footage really aggressively. 

**Riley:** Yeah, I was surprised what a visually lovely movie it was.

I think you could argue that it isn't necessarily a... deep movie, especially toward the end after everything ramps up. The film is all very dramatic and very visually arresting, and it's delightfully awful to watch Pattinson as Hansen, but I also don't know that it *says* anything about *Predator* or Hansen or those times beyond pointing out that everyone was a bit gross. And maybe it's a good choice to avoid passing some kind of definitive judgement, but riding home with my dad neither of us was sure exactly what the movie wanted us to come away with.

**Chris:** I don't think it really has to, and that's fine. Sometimes it's enough to make a movie about evil people in a time and place, and *Primetime* captures that. I was actually shocked at how funny the movie is, not in a jokey kind of way but in the way people will accidentally let something out that they don't realize is funny. There's a scene where Dan is being put up in a motel in Fort Myers, Florida, one of the worst places I've ever been to in America, and he is talking about how good his motel room is on the phone to his friend, and his friend is telling him how jealous he is that Dan has one of those nice automatic coffee machines.

I think *Primetime*'s director, Lance Oppenheim, coming from mainly a [documentary background](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4565262/?ref=aftermath.site) makes a lot of sense, because those are the kinds of comedic beats you put in a documentary.

Also, it's wild that he's doing this and [*You Can See Everything*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvW%5FN5p1q44&ref=aftermath.site) in the same year. He might win Best Picture *and* Best Documentary.

**Riley:** Ha, I didn't know he made *You Can See Everything* too until later--there were a million trailers before our screening, including one for that one, and trying to explain to my dad why people in our theater groaned when Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes came on screen was a real challenge.

**Chris:** Did you have the Chris Hansen ad before your showing? I know he booked out pre-trailer ads for a lot of theaters. 

**Riley:** Haha, we did! The people in the theater all laughed.

I read some writeups of how Hansen feels about the movie--he doesn't like it, predictably, but at least publicly he seems to be trying not to get all riled up?

**Chris:** How he cares about it is almost incidental to me. Like, yeah it's technically based on his life, but it's almost too fantastical to really be about him. Also, when you're that much of a fabulist, how much does the truth matter?

**Riley:** It was a surprise to me that he's [still doing the whole shtick](https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2026/09/27/primetime-asks-if-chris-hansen-is-predator-hes-sure-his-answer/?ref=aftermath.site). I think I sorta thought he just... I don't know, disappeared, though I suppose it's that sort of assumption that *Primetime* also explores: that people on TV are just, well, people on TV, and once the cameras are off they just don't exist anymore.

**Chris:** While I admit that the film focuses more on the scope of the world it depicts without going too far into the weeds about what it means, I do think that it's hard not to watch this movie and think that Hansen kinda won. These people exist and they beat out terrestrial television. *Primetime* is the spiritual prequel to the Conner O'Malley video "Pipe Rock Theory." 

  
**Riley:** Predator-catching is a [whole genre now](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/26/us/pedophile-hunting-violence.html?ref=aftermath.site) in a way I don't personally interact with, but as the movie explores I think it comes down to an assumption of, like, well everyone can agree child predation is bad, so whatever you do to these people or however you expose them, that is good and you're a hero. It's an easy venue for movie Hansen (and maybe real Hansen) and folks like him to justify their behavior and to assuage whatever unease they might have about how they go about pursuing fame.

**Chris:** I was describing *Primetime* to my friend as "my tummy hurts cinema," just movies about nasty people that leave a layer of oil on you after you watch them. If you wanna watch a movie about wretched and nasty people, I can't recommend it enough. 

**Riley:** It'll be fun to compare to the Elizabeth Holmes film, that's for sure.