Robert Pattinson is a monster in Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, which traces the ugly evolution of public shaming into network entertainment.
There’s a moment fairly early in Primetime when Chris Hansen, played by Robert Pattinson with the unnerving self-possession of a man who’s begun to suspect his own face belongs on currency, rehearses a line for To Catch a Predator. “When we come back, the parade of men begins,” he says, before trying it again. And again. The line needs a particular cadence, a little more menace here, a little more anticipation there. Hansen is ostensibly a journalist preparing to report “what happened.” But Lance Oppenheim shoots the scene like an actor searching for just the right take. The tension between those two distressingly different things will occupy the rest of the movie’s runtime.
Primetime is much stranger than the Chris Hansen rise-and-fall story it initially resembles (see last year’s stellar Predators for the documentary version). Oppenheim, making his narrative feature debut after documentaries including Some Kind of Heaven, Spermworld, and Ren Faire, could easily have made a media satire about the moment when journalism became entertainment. With all the expected stops along the way, such as ratings, fame, network pressure, and moral compromise. All of that material is here, sometimes very explicitly. Yet Primetime keeps orbiting a more unsettling question. If you perform a version of yourself for long enough, and the world rewards that performance enthusiastically enough, at what point does the performance become the person?
Pattinson’s Hansen provides the obvious test case. He has the famous cadence down, but his overall performance works because he pushes beyond impersonation into something almost metaphysical. His Hansen seems to exist half a second behind himself, as though some internal producer is constantly whispering instructions into his earpiece. Every pause has dramatic weight. Every stare feels composed for a camera that may or may not actually be present. Even his attempts at intimacy reveal a man accustomed to speaking immediately before a commercial break. Pattinson makes him funny, ridiculous, charismatic, and increasingly frightening because Hansen seems to believe completely in the character he’s created.
Everybody Wants to Be Somebody
The film’s more revealing character, however, might be Dan Plum, an aspiring actor played by Skyler Gisondo. Dan enters the film standing on the lower rungs of show business. He’s nonunion, unrepresented, proud of a commercial where his background role became a speaking part. And he’s hopeful that somebody, anybody, might finally notice him. His audition includes “Seasons of Love” from Rent, a choice that immediately establishes a specific species of earnest theater kid while giving Gisondo room to make Dan endearing without sanding away the desperation underneath.
The show hires Dan to play a teenage boy in one of Hansen’s stings, which creates one of Primetime’s best jokes, if you can call it that. He’s finally booked television work where doing his job perfectly requires the audience to forget he exists. Dan approaches the assignment through language he understands. His motivation, dialogue, character, authenticity. When a line sounds unnatural, he worries about whether a teenager would actually say it. When an encounter frightens him, he worries that he failed. He’s treating To Catch a Predator as an acting job because it is. And acting is also the framework through which he understands his own value.
Hansen quickly gives him another framework, though. During a conversation after a difficult sting, Dan explains what he hopes to get from the job: footage for his reel, a credit, union eligibility, representation. Hansen responds by telling him that his real credit is “superhero.” What Dan is doing, Hansen insists, transcends acting because he’s helping save children. And then Hansen tells him that he even reminds him of his son. Gisondo lets the compliment wash across Dan’s face with almost painful transparency. Here, finally, is somebody important telling him that he matters.
Hansen never needs to threaten Dan or even offer him much money. He simply finds the story Dan most wants to believe about himself and hands it right to him. Dan wants to become an actor, but becoming a hero sounds even better. Particularly when heroism comes with screen time. His transformation over the film involves learning the rhythms of Hansen’s performance until he can even reproduce them himself. Complete with the moral certainty that makes every humiliation feel righteous.
Television as Town Square
At one point, the film compares television to the pillory that once stood in the town square, where punishment became communal entertainment because everybody could gather around and watch. Television merely relocates the square into the home, allowing millions of people to participate without leaving the couch. The metaphor explains both the appeal of To Catch a Predator and the queasy fascination Primetime develops with its own images.
The original program created an unusually efficient form of spectatorship. The targets themselves had expressed horrific intentions, which meant viewers could enjoy watching them panic without experiencing the guilt that usually accompanies enjoying someone else’s humiliation. Hansen would emerge. The man would freeze. The chat transcripts would appear. Excuses would tumble out. Police waited outside to pounce. Every segment offered the satisfactions of a public execution while preserving the audience’s conviction that watching it represented a moral act.
This dynamic depends heavily on faces, and Oppenheim knows it. Hansen talks about the physical reaction he sees when targets recognize him, the flaring nostrils and sudden terror. He explicitly imagines how compelling those reactions will be for viewers. Fear becomes footage. Shame becomes a close-up. The show’s ostensible subject may be online predation, but its basic visual unit is the instant when a man realizes that the world is about to know what evils he’s done.
Primetime sends that visual grammar right back onto Hansen. Oppenheim and cinematographer David Bolen crowd Pattinson’s face into the frame, studying his skin, eyes, mouth, and increasingly bizarre expressions with the same intensity To Catch a Predator directs toward its subjects. Hansen built a career transforming other people into faces on television, and now he’s become one himself. Pattinson employs this almost instinctively, letting Hansen’s practiced composure occasionally flicker into something stranger before snapping back into place.
Something Evil in the Signal
That obsession with faces helps explain why Primetime looks so much like a horror movie. Its mid-2000s video textures smear and bloom, CRT screens glow ominously in dark rooms, and ordinary suburban houses acquire the atmosphere of locations where somebody recently watched the tape from The Ring. The imagery initially seems like an especially diseased form of period nostalgia, as though Oppenheim wants us to remember when everybody owned a Motorola Razr while simultaneously apologizing for making us remember it.
Eventually, though, the degradation begins to feel thematic. The images look contaminated because Primetime increasingly imagines evil as something that can travel through people and institutions. Almost like a signal moving through a cable. Hansen becomes especially revealing when he tells Dan about an old investigation involving missing children in India and a girl who supposedly encountered something in the darkness that she could barely describe. Hansen believed her, and the story suggests that he understands his work through an almost supernatural cosmology in which individual crimes represent manifestations of some ancient evil.
This is the belief that ultimately gives Hansen his useful organizing principle for the world. Criminals can be complicated human beings who’ve committed terrible acts. But monsters require considerably less sympathy. Once someone becomes an embodiment of evil, questions involving proportionality, procedure, journalistic ethics, and due process start feeling beside the point. You don’t ask whether Van Helsing has completed the appropriate release forms before he goes after Dracula.
The movie carefully avoids suggesting that the harm committed by predators and the ethical compromises of television journalists occupy anything close to the same moral plane. Instead, it becomes fascinated by what happens to people who convince themselves they stand permanently on the side of righteousness. Hansen can examine everyone except himself because his worldview has already assigned him the role of the person who exposes evil. The possibility that his own desires might distort that mission becomes almost impossible for him to recognize.
We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Predator
Hansen’s personal desires become harder to ignore once To Catch a Predator turns into a ratings phenomenon. One network executive essentially tells Hansen that he neither understands nor particularly admires the show. But America loves the thing, scripted television costs a fortune, and competitors are already trying to shamelessly copy the format. The conversation quickly shifts toward Wednesday-night scheduling, Lost, Joey, and the other banal considerations that govern network programming.
There’s something wonderfully obscene about hearing child protection discussed in the same breath as whether NBC can improve its time slot, but Primetime locates much of its own thematic argument inside that obscenity. Television has a remarkable ability to transform almost anything into, well, television. War, murder, natural disasters, polar bears, missing children, sexual predators. Eventually every subject becomes a piece of programming competing for the same finite quantity of human attention.
That’s why the success of Hansen’s show consequently creates the demand that haunts almost every successful entertainment franchise. The sequel has to go bigger. The production starts speaking in fishing metaphors, searching for increasingly significant catches until somebody finally invokes a “whale.” And that language gives Oppenheim room to turn To Catch a Predator into a warped version of Jaws, except everybody on the Orca keeps checking the overnight ratings while waiting for the shark.
The crucial shift occurs when reality begins refusing to cooperate. Targets begin to hesitate. Locations become compromised. The production burns money. Hansen keeps pushing because he can already imagine the episode that these events are supposed to become. Journalism traditionally discovers events and then attempts to make sense of them, while Hansen increasingly possesses the story first and needs reality to supply the proper ending.
This inversion gives Primetime its most disarming conception of performance. Dan pretends to be a teenager, the decoys perform innocence, suspects offer performances of innocence after being caught. Producers shape events into television, and Hansen rehearses the authoritative persona that will impose meaning on everything. Everyone here is acting, but Hansen is the only one who believes himself uniquely exempt from the category.
The Pillory in Your Pocket
It isn’t long before Primetime’s 2006 setting eventually stops feeling safely historical. The machinery required to make To Catch a Predator now seems almost hilariously cumbersome by today’s standards. NBC needed producers, camera operators, lawyers, decoys, houses, police cooperation, editors, satellite feeds, network infrastructure, and enormous amounts of money to create a spectacle of public humiliation. A contemporary version only requires a smartphone.
In the years since the show ended, vigilante sting videos, scammer confrontations, public freakouts, influencer exposés, reaction channels, livestreamed arguments, and algorithmically optimized pile-ons all operate according to some version of the format Hansen helped popularize. Where you establish wrongdoing, confront the wrongdoer, capture the reaction, distribute the humiliation, and invite the audience to experience watching as participation. Howard Beale eventually got his ring light.
That’s probably why Primetime is so much more interesting than another story about television sacrificing its principles for ratings. Oppenheim observes something closer to the larval stage of the attention economy, a moment when the enormous institutional machinery of broadcast television briefly discovered that moral outrage and public humiliation fit together beautifully. The technology has changed so dramatically that the old footage already resembles archaeological evidence. But the emotional mechanism remains immediately recognizable.
And perhaps that’s why the movie keeps returning to Dan, whose desire is far simpler than everybody else’s. He wants to be seen. He wants somebody to look at him and recognize an actor. A person with talent and potential, rather than yet another anonymous kid waiting for his big break. Primetime places that ordinary human hunger beside Hansen’s much grander desire to become the person who identifies monsters for America, then watches both men discover how easily television can satisfy both those desires while slowly changing what they mean.
In the film, Hansen imagines television as a replacement for the town-square pillory. A screen in every home where the community can gather to witness punishment. Seen from 2026, the metaphor feels almost quaint. We eventually shrank the pillory, connected it to the internet, gave everybody a camera, and slipped the whole thing into our pockets. Now the town square follows us everywhere.
