“Why don’t you have a seat?” I don’t know how many times Chris Hansen actually asked that question to the men he caught seeking sex with minors in his infamous televised sting operation, To Catch a Predator. But you know it has power, because it’s still a meme nearly 20 years after the show was last on the air. Now it’s about to be the subject of a new A24 movie, Primetime, with Robert Pattinson playing the controversial journalist.
On May 27, A24 released the trailer for Primetime, a crime drama from director Lance Oppenheim. The film stars Pattinson as Chris Hansen, the award-winning (and often criticized) television journalist and now YouTube creator who shot to fame in the late 2000s with To Catch a Predator on Dateline NBC. While Pattinson’s voice-over narration consists of words more or less straight from Hansen’s mouth from throughout To Catch a Predator, you can easily read them as Hansen interrogating himself and his brand of journalism that changed TV forever—and not necessarily all for the better.
“What would have happened if I wasn’t here?” Pattinson’s Chris Hansen asks, presumably to a caught predator. (But consider, for a moment, Hansen talking to himself.) “You see how this looks, right? At the end of the day, men must be held accountable for the decisions that he makes. Would you agree?”
He continues, “Do you watch television? Well, there’s something you should know. I’m Chris Hansen, with Dateline NBC. And you’re about to be a part of television history.”
You can watch the trailer below.
In case you weren’t around in the late 2000s, To Catch a Predator was a notorious recurring segment for Dateline NBC. Aligned with the now-defunct watchdog group Perverted-Justice, Hansen and his team lured men into chatting with underage boys and girls (really adults in disguise, of course) on the Internet. When the men arrive at the sting house expecting everyone’s worst fears, in walks Hansen, who professionally and coldly embarrasses them with printouts of their explicit chat logs. He then lets them walk “free” …to be caught by police waiting outside.
Against the backdrop of widespread paranoia about the Internet, which had become accessible to homes everywhere via high-speed access, To Catch a Predator came at just the right time to satiate (and stoke) fears about online predators and the safety of children. As righteous as it was to see sickos squirm, critics point out that other than providing catharsis, nothing Hansen and his show did would actually stick in court, and the vigilante approach undermined constitutional protections.
And then there’s the case of Bill Conradt, which Primetime hints at with an unmistakable gunshot embedded in the trailer’s sound mix. In November 2006, assistant district attorney Bill Conradt had solicited Perverted-Justice’s bait for sex. Importantly, Conradt did not travel to the sting home. Instead, a group consisting of police, Perverted-Justice members, and Dateline crew went to Conradt’s home with an inaccurate search warrant. Upon their arrival, Conradt shot himself while cameras were rolling; he died an hour later. A cop on the scene reportedly said, “That’ll make good TV.”
While To Catch a Predator never stomped pedophiles out from the Internet—the past decade of illicit DMs, Snapchats, and the practice of grooming being more widely known today—it’s impossible to ignore how Hansen’s show (a ratings juggernaut in its heyday) challenged our preconceived notions of what’s right and what’s just. Hopefully Primetime delivers on its potential. And if it doesn’t, well, it’s another movie in which Robert Pattinson can act like a total freak.
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