'Primetime' Asks What ‘To Catch a Predator’ Says About Us as a Society
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0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. For a generation of television viewers in the mid-2000s, few phrases carried as much weight as "have a seat." To Catch a Predator , the Dateline NBC series hosted by Chris Hansen, used decoys posing as minors online to lure adult men to a house, where Hansen would confront them on camera—often prefaced by his prompt to sit—before police moved in.
The show became a phenomenon, turning Hansen into a household name and one of the most recognizable faces on NBC.
Now the series is the subject of Primetime , a new A24 film starring Robert Pattinson as Hansen. In the film, director Lance Oppenheim and screenwriter Ajon Singh dramatize the rise of To Catch a Predator and the culture that made it must-see television.
Singh was around 9 years old when he first started watching the show. "I was on a diet of a lot of sort-of lurid stuff on television," he told Newsweek . "As a child, when I'd watch it, I didn't really have a concept of what an online predator was, and it kind of went over my head."
It wasn't until years later that Singh began to think seriously about what he had been watching and why it resonated with so many people. "The ratings, it was going punch for punch with anything else on television," he said. "I thought it was really strange, and that was kind of the inception point of this whole thing."
A central point of the film presents perhaps the most conflicting question about the legacy of To Catch a Predator : What does its popularity say about us as a society?
"We never intended to moralize about whether the show was ethical or not," Singh said. "We more wanted to point kind of a spotlight at culture and see what was happening that people were so excited by this program."
As for Hansen, he's been vocal about his opposition to the film.
"Nothing in that trailer except for the actor saying my name and 'have a seat' ever happened in real life. It's complete fiction," Hansen said on the Planet Tyrus podcast. After seeing the film, which he reviewed on his own podcast, Have a Seat With Chris Hansen , Hansen went on to say, "In a way, it's a hit piece on me and the series, which is weird."
Hansen purchased advertising at screenings of Primetime , where he is seen straight out of an episode of To Catch a Predator , telling the audience to "have a seat" and that "the real work continues" on his true-crime streaming platform, TruBlu.
Singh pointed out that despite his objections, Hansen has encouraged people to see the film. "He said, you know what, go see the movie and ‘make up your own mind,’" Singh said. "If you were really, really opposed to something, would you do that? Our goal was always to make him a complicated figure."
And as Singh has noticed, the reaction to the project is different among generations.
"We were seeing the stats that 69 percent of the viewers for Primetime are Gen Z," Singh said. "A lot of the cultural references are before they were born or they didn't really understand, and it's so exciting to me that there's something nostalgic that we're able to sort of incept into their brains."
Primetime does a great job of capturing that dance between being uncomfortable and being heroic, forcing us to really ponder our own part in Hansen’s endeavor.
"We really want to challenge the audience to empathize when it seems so impossible to do so," Singh said. "And if they can't, that's fine. It is what it is."
The things Hansen did on To Catch a Predator have morphed into viral social media posts of regular people and groups doing their own version of Predator .
"I've seen videos of people pouring cayenne peppers in guys' eyes and knocking them out cold on the street," Singh said of the social media posts. "In comparison to that, Chris Hansen is sort of this statesman. The difference between then and now is the algorithms on social media are really preying on our worst instincts."
Ultimately Hansen's To Catch a Predator was canceled after a target of the production died by suicide during a filmed segment of the show, which is portrayed in the film. The severity of its ending is sobering, raising the question: Did they go too far? The answer to that is largely up to you. Justice as entertainment has long been a source of content, before Hansen even entered the scene, but what Hansen did made it infamous.
"There used to be a pillory in every civilized town," Singh said. "Chris Hansen didn't invent it. He just found an opportunity to showcase it on a national platform and get great ratings because of it. What we were more curious about is, why was watching it so impressive?”
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