“Don’t you just ever wanna bleed ‘em?” — Man on plane
“I think what I do is a little worse.” — Chris Hansen
Anyone who has seen Predators, David Osit’s outstanding 2025 documentary about Chris Hansen and the controversial TV show, To Catch a Predator, won’t find anything necessarily new in Lance Oppenheim’s narrative feature debut, Primetime. What you will get is a splashy, flashy recreation of the making of a morally questionable TV show and its cast of desperate-for-fame characters led by Hansen, played with steely, slimy, arrogant, egomaniacal finesse by Robert Pattinson.
The early part of the film, set in 2006, focuses on the show in its early days with gum-chewing producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever) and the Perverted-Justice cofounder Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher) fashioning what the show would become, basically a quest to trap suspected child predators and expose them on national television. The motives are seemingly noble, but it becomes an ethical and moral quagmire since it’s all being done for ratings and one must wonder, as one of the alleged predators shouts at Hansen, “who gave you permission to do this?”
Jeff Zucker, president of NBC (played by Zucker himself) doesn’t like the show but, “the people do,” so he decides to roll the dice and schedule it during primetime opposite the big ABC hit Lost.
Andie finds the perfect “nubile hairless boyman” recruit with 23-year-old Dan Plum (a strangely mesmerizing Skyler Gisondo who is 30 but looks 16) who auditions by singing “Seasons of Love,” from Rent, which will be chillingly reprised later in the film. Plum is tossed right into the fire and is apprehensive about taking on the gig but is persuaded/manipulated by Hansen, who calls him Decoy Dan and tells him he’s a superhero.
There’s much more plot including the National Enquirer threatening to expose Hansen’s extramarital fling, but it all leads to a dramatic denouement, which will come as no surprise to anyone who watched saw Predators.
The film is loosely based on the 2007 Esquire article “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,” although I can’t imagine first-time screenwriter Ajon Singh wasn’t also inspired by Osit’s doc. The script is the weakest element of the film (when it should have been the strongest), mostly just recreating events and never really diving into any kind of questions of responsibility. It’s presentational, almost deliberately avoiding controversy aside from the obvious, with no real commentary on the moral and ethical messiness of it all–although the film ends with an odd focus shift that suggests that another draft of the script might have had more nuance.
The character of Hansen is also an issue; the movie never even goes beyond the plastic TV persona. Sure, we get a lot of his studied, salacious and soon-to-be-infamous line deliveries like, “You see how this looks, right?” and “Your penis is already out!” But we barely see him at home with his wife or even spend much time with him and the young woman he has an affair with. Perhaps the filmmakers are making some point about the person and character not being far from the same entity. Perhaps?
I was struck by how Hansen seemed to bask in memorizing those salacious lines, spoken by the predators, before “showtime.” There was something genuinely creepy-eerie going on. I wish the film had gone deeper examining that.
The performance revelation is Wever. I’ve loved her in everything she’s been in since Showtime’s Nurse Jackie. But we’ve never quite seen her so deliciously ruthless. She deserves to be in the awards conversation, although she isn’t given that one meaty scene that usually snags a nomination. Her last line will bring chills.
Primetime is, ultimately, a much less stinging, modern version of Sidney Lumet’s seminal film Network, with Wever as Faye Dunaway’s Diana Christensen’s granddaughter! (Imagine that character having children?) I would relish a film based on her character with Wever sinking her vampire teeth into the role.
Primetime premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival.
It will be release by A24 on September 25, 2026.
