What is the Point of PRIMETIME? (the film by Lance Oppenheim)
In case you’re unfamiliar with the source material, back in 2004–2007, there was a Dateline NBC hidden-camera show called To Catch a Predator, hosted by journalist Chris Hansen (played by Robert Pattinson in Primetime). The show got slotted at primetime, and it was NBC’s main shot at beating the ratings of the competing network drama, Lost.
Official trailer for Lance Oppenheim’s PRIMETIME, about Dateline NBC’s hidden-camera show TO CATCH A PREDATOR, hosted by Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson)
What is the plot of Primetime movie?
The premise of the To Catch a Predator TV show was almost procedural:
Hacker Xavier Von Erck (co-founder of the online internet vigilante organization Perverted Justice co-founder of the online internet vigilante organization Perverted Justice, portrayed in Primetime by Matthew Maher) locates a (would-be) child predator in an online chatroom
Von Erck chats explicitly about sex with the person—while posing as a child
Von Erck, still posing as a child, sets a meetup time with the man (all men, I think) at the supposed home of the child, “the sting house,” which is fitted with hidden cameras
A decoy (played by Phoebe Bridgers and Skyler Gisondo in Primetime), who is a professional actor playing the role of a child, is stationed at the home. When the man arrives, the decoy answers the door and invites the man inside
The decoy goes to a back room for some reason
Chris Hansen—the journalist and host—confronts the man with messages from the chatroom, while recording for national television
When the man exits the house, the local police team dramatically (often violently) arrests the man, while recording for national television
I’ve tried to phrase that sequence as neutrally as possible, but if you’re a person who is familiar with true crime (or, you know the law), you might have some of the questions that I had, like…
Are there any actual minors involved?
Answer: No. And sexual acts between adults and adults acting like children is not criminalized, as far as I understand.
If there are no actual minors involved… was a crime committed? Where does one cross over from “just chat,” as MarriedAndLookingForFun31313 (Tony Revolori) said, to criminal intent?
Answer: According to my friend who is a lawyer, a trier of fact would decide whether “acts” were committed in furtherance of an intended goal… like going there, buying things, and statements of intent in the chat itself.
Where’s the line of entrapment?
Answer: I don’t know—seems like the man would have to message first?
Suffice it to say, there’s a lot of gray area here, and even though I do fundamentally agree in a zero-tolerance policy toward child abuse of any kind… being entertained by To Catch a Predator, and thereby the movie Primetime, which dramatizes the TV show, that seems unfair to me as a viewer.
It seems unfair because I already know the show is disgusting. This form of entertainment is unequivocally grotesque: I don’t want to watch a man try to seduce a child. No matter how staged it is. And I don’t want to watch the brutal policing of that crime, either. I thought I was seated here today to hear something new about this situation, to come away with a fresh reflection at least. In my opinion, this film did not add to the conversation, it merely dramatized what happened without much reflection at all. If there was a take-away, it’s that the entertainment industry will do anything to get you to watch, and this film is yet another example of it. No matter how well it told the story as it happened. No matter how funny the dark humor. No matter how well Robert Pattinson and Merrit Wever and Skyler Gisondo and Phoebe Bridgers portray the people involved—and they do. As a film, excellent work. It just… showed me what I already knew. It seems to me, in the wake of Chris Hansen’s reaction to the film, most people in the audience will also already understand the disgust.
Courtesy of A24.
Current controversy over Primetime movie
So, the current controversy over the film Primetime, as I understand it, is because the actual Chris Hansen wasn’t consulted before they told this story—which is not a traditional biopic, anyway—and he wasn’t allowed to screen it in advance because he refused to sign an NDA.
The production company, A24, has commented that it was a normal NDA for an advanced screening of a not-yet-released film. If you’ve been to an advanced screening, then you know the contract is basically to prevent leaks and piracy, and because they’re not always completely finished with the film—sometimes the makers even ask for feedback to improve it. A normal Non-Disclosure Agreement for an advanced screening is kind of expected.
According to the Hollywood Reporter,
Hansen told Fox News he wouldn’t “sign away my rights to my name, image, and brand, essentially, as well as any potential legal rights that would come out of the movie.”
So, Hansen skipped the film, but from the plot points alone, he condemned it. I mean, if you watched the trailer above, you can already see that his portrayal is not flattering. HR reported that Hansen did purchase ad space ahead of every theatrical run of Primetime, though. The ad for TruBlu, his streaming platform, starts with a variation on his famous line, “I’m going to need everyone in the theater to take a seat right over there.”
The actual commercial for for his streaming network, TruBlu, that Chris Hansen has paid to advertise ahead of PRIMETIME theater screenings.
Although he’s not in support of Primetime—he actually called it “an insult”—he is inadvertently promoting the film.
Is the Primetime movie based on a true story?
YES. Emphatically yes, the Primetime movie is based on true events. That’s the whole thing. And in case anyone needs reminding of why the hidden-camera/news-story/reality show stopped running, it’s because one of the men they tried to catch on To Catch a Predator completed suicide as a result.
The film is, actually, in part based on Luke Dittrich’s Esquire article entitled, “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die.”
(SPOILERS START HERE)
Courtesy of A24.
I was not there when it happened, of course, but the way the Primetime film portrays it, the case of Murphy, Texas’ Assistant District Attorney (former District Attorney) Louis “Bill” Conradt definitely looks like entrapment.
Rather than luring the man to the hidden camera house, the production team and the SWAT team go to his house in Terrell. Producer Andie Bender (Merrit Wever) even tells the police officers she wants cameras on their guns, otherwise she can’t “get the interview.”
While on the phone with Decoy Dan (Skyler Gisondo), while they’re talking about watching the musical RENT together, D.A. Bill Conradt (Alex Winter) shoots himself through the head.
That is, more or less, where the film ends, too. At the same place as the show.
Andie does give us one more moment of Ick, though, when she says “I can make this work.” Meaning, I can still make this an entertaining episode even without interviewing the target, because he just died. “I can interview some police,” she says.
And, in one more moment of Yuck, a year later, when it seems like Decoy Dan Plumb has abandoned his acting career, his SAG card arrives in the mail for his work on To Catch a Predator. (In real life, the actor Dan Schrack moved on to be a television news anchor, and he does not include his acting credit in To Catch a Predator in any online bio or resume.)
Again, I don’t know how much dramatic license was taken in this case’s portrayal—who among us could know—but generally speaking, the film ends where the show ended.
The ethics of writing about/dramatizing true crime.
I’m an author of two true crime books. The protagonists of both of those books are the criminals themselves. It’s hard to portray someone as a monster and a person. It’s much easier to dismiss them wholly as a monster. The balance is hard to strike creatively, but it’s also really hard to do it ethically. As Friedrich Nietzsche says in Beyond Good and Evil, “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
Although I did not grasp a fresh takeaway, two characters in Primetime do seem to understand the delicate balance, Decoy Del (Phoebe Bridger) and Decoy Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo).
Del as Primetime’s moral compass
In the very beginning, we get the save-the-cat moment from Del. She is (in Primetime) the TV show’s moral compass. First, she refuses to go into the sting house when she finds a pair of thong underwear reading “Contents Aged Over 18 Years” on To Catch a Predator’s official merch website. Later, in an interview, she says she has worked with many SA victims, and she feels like she’s helping to prevent more abuse from occurring—unlike the character of Hansen, who tells Decoy Dan it’s his “sacred duty” to “cleanse the world of an ancient evil,” and clearly values the ego of being a hero more than serving actual justice. Del gets that there’s a line. It’s a very clear line to her. She may be the only character who even knows that line exists.
Decoy Dan as the audience entry into the world of catching predators
Dan Plumb, the character, is an aspiring actor who falls into the role of Decoy. (In real life, the actor Dan Schrack believed he would be involved in dramatic reenactments, not televised sting operations.) The character Decoy Dan doesn’t fully realize what he has signed on for until he’s thrust into the middle of a sting, when he gets the man a glass of water and turns around to the trauma of seeing this adult man with whipped cream on his genitals.
I personally think that not receiving a full disclosure about the nature of the work is a form of abuse itself, but regardless of my opinion, Dan is definitely traumatized. So much so that Andie pushes Chris to go give him a pep-talk, to encourage him that he’s doing good work, that he’s not, as Dan verbalizes it, “The bad guy.”
There’s even one moment where Dan gets to deliver the interview that Hansen normally does—and in the expression on his face when he hears the tackle and taser outside the house, it does seem like he fully realizes that the show is more about entertainment than justice.
Courtesy of A24.
That doesn’t stop Dan Plumb, though.
Decoy Dan doesn’t get fully disillusioned in Primetime until Bill Conradt takes his own life. In the film, Conradt dies as the police enter his house. He’s a prosecutor, so he knows how this plays out: even if he’s ultimately determined “not guilty,” his life is ruined, if only by being on the show. I’m not saying the character’s behavior was okay: I’m saying, vigilante justice like this is very dangerous. The film seems to emphasize that, too. (So did the court settlement when Conradt’s real life sister sued NBC for $105 million in 2008.)
I’ve heard it argued that Primetime takes Chris Hansen’s cameras and points them back at him, using a similar tactic of his television show to illustrate his own predatory nature. Okay. But my question is this: to what end? Don’t we already agree on that?
What is the point of the Primetime movie?
It seems to me that most people who want to see this film are not the guy-on-the-plane as portrayed by Creed Bratton. They’re not the ones who watched To Catch a Predator for entertainment. They’re not the ones who want to “make them bleed.” The audience for Primetime seems to be the people who remember Chris Hansen (or at least To Catch a Predator) as gross. And if that’s the people who have, to borrow his phrase, taken a seat, the film is telling us what we already believe. Not only that, but it is effectively making us the ones who watch To Kill a Predator. By watching Primetime, are we not also watching Hansen “bleed?” And isn’t he a man, a maybe less-bad man than the ones he was trying to catch?
I don’t want to be a part of that audience. I feel tricked. No matter how well written (by Ajon Singh), acted, and directed the film was—and it definitely was, all of those things, and it will probably win awards—what I sat down for was not what I watched, and it made me feel complicit in a toxic entertainment machine that I wish would wear itself out.
Primetime releases nationwide in U.S. theaters on Friday, September 25, 2026.
If this story stuck with you, then you may want to read these…
—This Is What Happened at a Typical Scottish Witch Trial
—The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told
—The "Real" Witches of Macbeth
