Chris Hansen Became America’s Favorite Predator Catcher
To Catch a Predator started back in 2004 and had host Chris Hansen coming face to face with adults trying to meet up with young children for sexual reasons. His team of predator catchers would bait these men into revealing themselves and their intentions with children and then their decoys would bring them into the home, have them talk about their ideas, and then Hansen would walk out and the rest was history.
The new A24 film Primetime explores the show’s creation and what led to its quick demise as Hansen continued to push (alongside his producing team) to expose the biggest monsters they could find. The issue ultimately came when To Catch a Predator aired an episode when Texas Republican District Attorney Bill Conradt shot himself when the police came to his home on the episode.
Hansen, played by Robert Pattinson, has rightfully, in many circles, been seen as a hero for the work he was doing. And Primetime, much like the 2025 documentary Predators, shows the complex nature of the show, the copycats that it inspired, and why Hansen’s need to be the “good guy” in this situation isn’t always with the best intentions.
It Isn’t Making Chris Hansen the Bad Guy, It’s Perspective
Going into Primetime, the concern for many was that the film would make the men trying to have sex with teenagers sympathetic characters. That’s not what happens at all. Much like the show itself, the audience barely gets time to care about these men with nefarious and horrifying goals. What the film does though is explore Hansen’s goals as well. Back when the show was airing in the 2000s, Hansen was praised for being the hero who came face to face with these men. As we have seen in the documentary Predators, he’s willing to do whatever it takes to bring justice to people he deems fit.
What Primetime does with that is show how Hansen’s seeming desperation to stay important enough to beat Lost led to Murphy, Texas. Hansen and his producer, Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), are looking for the biggest monsters possible to take on. Meaning that the show in Primetime‘s version of events is less worried about actually stopping all predators and instead, looking for the shock value to keep them in the Primetime spot.
Characters like Andie are fictionalized versions of producers that Hansen worked with. There are references to the show, like Decoy Dan being named Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo) when the real Decoy Dan was Dan Schrack. Del (Phoebe Bridgers) is based on Del Harvey who worked with Perverted Justice, the group that helped lure the men to the decoy homes.
The use of fictionalized people to tell real stories from the show allows Oppenheim and Primetime explore exactly what the show was willing to do to be relevant, ultimately losing what made it important to begin with. The shock of Jonathan Lipnicki’s Crazyfrog73 (based on the episode that featured Joshua Simpson) standing naked in front of Decoy Dan on his first episode is horrifying but we see how the fictionalized team is almost gleeful to be able to put that on television.
You see how this looks, right?
Verdict: Robert Pattinson Is Perfection
So much of this movie works because of Pattinson’s performance as Hansen. There is a coldness to the way he approaches these men that doesn’t feel like he cares about the victims but rather just getting the label of “hero.” To be fair, a lot of my viewing of Primetime was colored by having watched Predators and seeing how Hansen continued to go after an 18 year old high school senior who was talking to a fellow high school student decoy. Watching Hansen then continue to push for the virility of the story really changed how many viewed what he was doing. That worked incredibly well when watching Primetime.
The movie is complex because it is exploring how the team behind To Catch a Predator was, potentially, in it for the glory and not necessarily for the reasons they should have been but it is a fascinating character study for Hansen, the public at the time, and what To Catch a Predator inspired.
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