Tall, blandly handsome Chris Hansen began as a TV reporter like any other. He cut his teeth on regional stories before hitting the big time when he joined NBC News as a correspondent before becoming a regular contributor to Dateline NBC. So far, so good, but run-of-the-mill reporters don’t find themselves the focus of high-profile feature films, like Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime.
No, Hansen was something else. When NBC tapped him as host of Dateline’s spinoff series To Catch a Predator in 2004, he became iconic: a hero to viewers who saw nothing hinky about sting operations involving paid actors, a villain to viewers who found the whole thing sleazy as hell, and a gift to Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons, because the show was rife for parody.
The setup was remarkably simple, at least on the surface. Members of Perverted-Justice, To Catch a Predator’s volunteer-run partner organization, would catfish male adults by posing as underage girls and boys on online message boards in order to arrange sexual encounters.
With NBC’s resources, suburban rentals across the country would be staged to look like family homes. The “decoy,” a male or female actor in their 20s, would greet the guest while hidden cameras captured their small talk, but the minute things took a sexual turn, Hansen would emerge from the shadows like an off-duty David Caruso, circa CSI: Miami, before reading quotes from the chat transcripts, followed by a verbal beatdown, then a tension-relieving “You’re free to go,” only for waiting police officers to arrest the man for online solicitation of a minor.
Though the decoys and locations would change, the ruse could only go on for so long, since word would get out whenever the 40-person crew came to town. Just as sexual predators could use message boards to meet minors, they could also use them to warn other predators.
But that isn’t what killed the series. To show what did, screenwriter Ajon Singh adapted the 2007 Esquire article “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,” but instead of focusing on the Texas man (played by actor/director Alex Winter, a child sexual abuse survivor) who would make the worst decision of his life, Oppenheim shifts between Hansen (a blond-tipped Robert Pattinson), producer Andie Bender (Severance’s Merritt Wever), and decoy Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo, Superman’s Jimmy Olsen). Rather than a tragedy, it’s a horror satire in which Hansen, in his quest for ratings, becomes as harmful as the predators he aims to catch. In an entirely different way, of course.
NBC stuck with Hansen after the show came to a halt in 2007, but the network parted ways with him in 2013. Since then, YouTube has provided the home for his “news gathering,” as he calls it.
As for the actor who portrays him, Pattinson has continually challenged himself as an actor since his Twilight days, and it’s admirable, even if his reach can exceed his grasp. He has a tendency, for instance, to fade next to more powerful costars, like Guy Pearce in The Rover, Willem Dafoe in The Lighthouse, or Jennifer Lawrence in Die My Love. In Primetime, however, he rises to the occasion as a hollow man who believes his own hype. It’s the best work he’s done since David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, where he played another king-of-the-world type. He and Wever are particularly terrific together, possibly because she isn’t playing a romantic foil. As a performer, her earthy groundedness generates a compelling tension with his character’s studied slickness.
In a film filled with many shades of creep, including Matthew Maher as the founder of Perverted-Justice, Del (singer/songwriter Phoebe Bridgers) and Dan come closest to the good–or at least neutral–pawns in the game as aspiring actors just trying to get credits on their resumes and make a few bucks. With her white-blonde hair dyed dark brown, the barely-recognizable Bridgers makes a vivid impression in her most substantial role to date. I wish I could say the same of Anna Faris, but she’s wasted as Hansen’s neglected wife.
Considering his background as a documentarian, Oppenheim (Some Kind of Heaven and co-director of the upcoming Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything) has a sure hand with actors, and Primetime is plenty entertaining, if somewhat anticlimactic after David Osit’s 2025 documentary Predators, which covers similar ground, but without the glibness that often accompanies satire.
As a survivor of child sexual abuse himself, Osit takes a more nuanced approach to the subject, bolstered by unaired footage which shows some of these men in a different light, but instead of rehabilitation, Hansen presented public humiliation and criminal charges as their only options.
Osit’s ace in the hole was the sit-down interview with Hansen that concludes his documentary. Pattinson fully earns his flowers as an almost cartoonishly terrifying version of the guy, but there’s nothing quite like the real thing. As Hansen boasts, “What I do is for a greater purpose.”
