Chris Hansen is a crusader of the postmodern world. A relentless careerist and ten-time Emmy winner, the Chicago-born media personality weaponized his television appearances in a fight for all good, against all evil. He sent shockwaves of fear through American television sets by reporting on the Boston hijackings leading up to 9/11, uncovering al-Qaeda operations, and tackling the Columbine massacre that marked the dawn of contemporary incel school-shooter culture. The biggest terror he instilled in the hearts of millions of American viewers, however, was surely his exposé of the “dangerous web”: the murky swamps of the internet that housed countless cyber criminals and child sex offenders.
Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator (2004-2007) was Hansen’s state-of-the-art pillory, a Foucauldian tool for Discipline and Punish, rendered live on primetime television. Teaming up with the vigilante action group “Perverted-Justice,” Hansen successfully lured internet pedophiles into a web of his own devising. First, a decoy actor pretending to be a sex-positive minor would welcome a hapless man into a temporary location riddled with hidden cameras. Shortly after, Hansen would step into the frame, invite the perpetrator/victim to “take a seat right over there,” and dramatically serve up perverted justice. Millions of viewers tuned in to witness these public arrests of alleged pedophiles, until a chaotic shoot in Murphy, Texas, ended with the suicide of assistant district attorney Bill Conradt at his home in nearby Terrell — a tragic media event in its own right that inevitably pulled the trigger on and put the nail in the coffin of Hansen’s primetime slot on American television.
The sensational story behind To Catch a Predator gave fuel to countless other media artifacts, ranging from South Park parodies, eBaum’s World memes, and more respectable texts like the David Osit-helmed documentary Predators (2025). And now, stepping into this saturated arena is Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, which finds the indie maverick offering something much greater than a mere recounting of the sordid saga. His conceptually dense fiction debut stands as one of the most accomplished commentaries on the delirious media saturation of a highly particular era: a feverish moment right after 9/11 that preceded the dawn of the iPhone epoch and ushered in an entirely new media ecosystem.
The 30-year-old director is genuinely invested in the real-life story of Chris Hansen and does a handsome job of personifying this TV celebrity as he lives through his rise and fall. But one also can’t miss Oppenheim’s obsession with capturing the idiosyncrasies of a bygone DV-cam television landscape, a moment when mainstream audiovisual culture thirsted for blood and prowled for new enemies to rip to shreds. Back then, the post-9/11 lust for revenge propelled the media outwards and inwards, and Primetime suggests the non-stop broadcasting of the Iraq invasion stems from the same mass hysteria as the urge to destroy American lives through the prism of reality TV.
Doggedly portrayed by Robert Pattinson, who also produced the film, Hansen resents the cultural prestige news anchors accumulate doing the supposedly Important Job of reporting on the Middle East. His level of success, however, is measured in viewership, which he racks up by the millions as soon as he slips into the role of America’s most trusted anti-pedo warrior. Primetime’s first half best captures this ceaseless hunger with a cascading montage that gasses up the film so much that it seems to get high. Skillfully cutting across the feeds of no fewer than 10 cameras deployed during the shoot, editor Daniel Garber (of left-wing domestic terrorism thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline fame) composes an overwhelming media collage that idiomatically dissects the live television apparatus at the peak of its power.
Meanwhile, Oppenheim and debut screenwriter Ajon Singh revel in this era’s media artifacts. Hansen’s ego levels overwhelm the film when he finds out that his show will boot the magnum opus of serial television Lost from its primetime slot. The oversaturated shots of John Locke fighting polar bears in the jungle naturally bleed into the visual register of Primetime, suggesting that the film’s heroes will soon also be lost in their own perpetual quest for redemption. Primetime compares the antagonism of Hansen’s crew, headhunters through and through, to the highly weaponized Texas police department that does its target practice on cutouts of Osama bin Laden. As such, the film’s entire vibe is impregnated with a sense of American exceptionalism turned sour, epitomized most literally in a throwaway reference to Subway Jared — a world-famous spokesperson and the face of triumphant consumerism who turned out to be a child sex offender — that is easy to miss but hard to shake.
It’s rare to see an American film that so gleefully targets the ailing self-delusion of its own country. The fact that Oppenheim does it on such a large scale, with such grand talents behind and in front of the camera, justifies his meteoric rise as one of America’s most astute indie directors. The young dog already deserved his accolades with a trio of semi-ironic, hard-hitting documentaries, including recent non-fiction highlight Spermworld (2024), and now he cranks up the heat with a film so salacious in its content and so persistent in its media-archaeological obsession that it’s easy to forgive him for the occasional slip-up in terms of structure and pacing. Specifically, some scenes can occasionally cave in under their own weight, making it too early to call Primetime Oppenheim’s first masterpiece. Nonetheless, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more captivating fiction debut out there these days. In an age of true-crime slop, pornified reality TV, and split-screen visual overstimulation, Primetime sagely points its viewers to the fact that we still live in the demented media logic of Hansen’s design. Oppenheim makes a great case, then, that we should not remember him for his television inquisition, but rather for how his architecture of mass entertainment exposed a moral rot that has seeped into all of our bones.
Comments are closed.