Roughly a year before Lance Oppenheim’s Primetimehit theaters, another documentarian revisited the early-aughts cultural artifact that is To Catch A Predator and its star host, Chris Hansen. David Osit (Mayor, Thank You For Playing) went back to the raw footage and outtakes of the show and followed Hansen’s post-series legacy. After TCAP, Hansen continued his work unmasking men seeking minors on the internet with his own streaming network, TruBlu, while other media-savvy vigilante copycats elsewhere took up his cause. Osit’s film covering all this, Predators, is a sobering look at the impact the show had on its viewers, its participants, and the men profiled on Hansen’s programs. Instead of the black-and-white version of good guys versus bad guys, the documentary exposes the gray areas, questioning if To Catch A Predator truly carried out its mission to save kids or if it was more a public humiliation ritual for the sake of nightly entertainment.
At one point, Oppenheim thought his vision of Chris Hansen’s story wouldn’t go forward because of its basic similarities to Osit’s Predators, but with the addition of collaborators like Pattinson, Primetime ended up going in a fairly different direction. While both filmmakers share nonfiction backgrounds, they each bring their own sense of style to their works, resulting in movies with vastly different looks. Primetime is saturated with deep colors, but by the end of Predators, Osit strips away as much artifice as possible for a straightforward talk with Hansen himself. While both films immerse their viewers in the world of To Catch A Predator, each takes different approaches to critique what became, for a time, appointment television.
Primetime is more centrally focused on Hansen, visualizing the tortured headspace of a man driven mad by his ambitions, grappling with demonic visions and ego-driven decisions that affect both his professional and personal life. Predators takes a longer view of history, following the ripple effects of Hansen’s show and asking bluntly if his work had done any real good in society. In Predators, Hansen is less a show-stopping character and more of a conduit channeling society’s reaction to predatory behavior, giving the anger and outrage over such behavior a public square. But both films question Hansen’s self-righteous authority and the loss of due process in the digital age using elements To Catch A Predator itself—like its multicamera live feed and Hansen’s own catchphrases.
Although Oppenheim’s film is a fictionalized version of events and Osit’s documentary spends as much time in the present as the past, Primetime and Predators start with the same inspiration, cover some of the same events, and inevitably share a number of similarities, starting with its central figure. Primetime retraces Hansen’s meteoric rise to the big time, hosting his own show up against heavy-hitting sitcoms and dramas. As Hansen, Robert Pattinson commands Primetime with a shark-like focus until his all-consuming ambitions push him to a breaking point. Pattinson’s Hansen acts like a ringleader losing control of his circus, hubristic and uncompromising. He rallies his decoys to continue playing the role of bait in his traps and pushes his team to chase after a high-profile target for the sake of ratings, a pursuit that overshadows the show’s stated purpose to protect kids. Pattinson puts on a craven, over-the-top performance—which the real Hansen hasn’t been thrilled about—as it all leads to one of the series’ most tragic events with an assistant district attorney in Texas, which becomes a frenzied climax.
In contrast, Osit’s film is chillingly cold. Predators lays out the show’s footage methodically, adding in new interviews with the show’s real decoys, and adds context, like an ethnographer theorizing why this kind of infotainment took off so spectacularly. Predators is partly composed of archival footage from the show and later interviews that are set up so that the subjects are talking straight to the camera, contrasting the ambush-style interview Hansen became known for on To Catch A Predator with a sobering stillness. As reruns live on and copycats take on Hansen’s mantle before he dives back into fray himself, Predators questions the exploitive nature of the program even more deeply, explicitly asking who made Hansen and his ilk judge, jury, and executioner (or public humiliator), especially since many of the crimes and creepy chats caught for the cameras aren’t admissible in court. It’s all for show, but its power can harm those caught in gray areas, like an 18-year-old high schooler who was legally pardoned, but remains haunted by his internet footprint.
Perhaps most unsettling, though, is how the films diverge around Hansen’s response to one of his show’s most infamous moments. After the assistant district attorney kills himself, as the cops rush in for a juicy TV moment, Primetime closes in on Pattinson as Hansen, his face slack in shock, asks himself if this tragedy would have occurred without him. Predators reveals a more unnerving reality: In the actual aftermath of the suicide, Hansen quickly got to work interviewing the cops involved in order to salvage the episode. Although Predators is much more contemplative than the garish version of Hansen in Primetime, its stranger-than-fiction approach throws a sobering light on the man, the myth, the meme, and his legacy.
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