What 'Primetime' Changes About the Chris Hansen Predator-Hunter Story
Summary: Readers will learn what the Robert Pattinson film "Primetime" is about, how it turns Chris Hansen's "To Catch a Predator" into surreal media satire, and why Hansen has distanced himself from the project.
Robert Pattinson plays Chris Hansen in "Primetime," a darkly surreal media satire that premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Hansen is the Emmy-winning journalist who hosted "To Catch a Predator" on NBC's Dateline from 2004 to 2007. The five-star BBC Culture review by Nicholas Barber describes the show's format: staff posed as minors in online conversations with adult men, arranged meetings, and then waited for Hansen to walk in with a camera crew and ask, with devastating politeness, what the men were thinking.
A TV Format Turned Into a Fever Dream
"Primetime" is not a conventional biopic. Barber writes that it skips Hansen's backstory and the creation of his show. Instead, the screenplay by Ajon Singh drops viewers into a fever dream in which everything is believable but unsettlingly weird. The film sees "To Catch a Predator" as a hinge between TV eras: "Friends" ended its run in 2004, and a grim new age of reality television began.
Pattinson's Hansen is a slippery creep — sometimes buffoonish in self-confidence, sometimes sinister, sometimes on the verge of madness. Director Oppenheim told the BBC that the performance is a cross between Jerry Maguire and Dracula.
The Hunter as Ambiguous Spectacle
Hansen was not involved in making "Primetime." He has been critical of the film without seeing it, and he has paid for adverts to be shown before every US cinema screening. Barber notes that Hansen probably will not love how he is portrayed.
The film's sharper move is to reframe the predator-hunter story. It does not present Hansen's sting as clean, righteous journalism. It asks what the format unlocked: television's appetite for humiliation, confrontation, and ritual spectacle. Alongside another Venice title, "Ink," "Primetime" is one of two films at the festival lamenting a new strain of media sensationalism.
That framing matters beyond the festival circuit. Hansen's paid adverts show how much is at stake in how this story is told, and the film makes the hunter as ambiguous as the hunted. "Primetime" is satire, not documentary, and the real Hansen has yet to see it. But the question it raises is direct: when the camera crew arrives, who is really performing?