Primetime is a film directed by Lance Oppenheim, starring Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, Skyler Gisondo as Dan Plum, a decoy, and Merrit Wever as Andie Bender, the producer. The film follows Chris Hansen in 2006, at the peak of his show, To Catch A Predator. His goal is to procure and stay in the Dateline NBC primetime slot. The production employs a new young-looking decoy, Dan Plum, an aspiring actor trying to earn his SAG card.
Driven by his ego and mounting pressure from producer Andie Bender, Hansen becomes obsessed with catching a “whale,” rumored to be a high-ranking public official in a small Texan town. The movie mainly explores Hansen’s descent into being more of a vigilante than a hero. The line blurs between him helping to keep predators off the streets, and the exploitation of his crew and turning criminals into entertainment.
I think that while Chris Hansen truly did so much to promote online safety and helped to capture hundreds of predators, the goodness of his actions becomes obscured when you see how his drive stems from selfish reasons. Hansen truly wants to be the best on the channel, wanting that slot, that it clouds his judgement and puts his staff into extremely stressful and traumatic situations.
Chris Hansen himself watched and reviewed Primetime. He obviously disagreed with how he was portrayed, stating that Pattinson’s portrayal was over-the-top, zealous, and inaccurate to how he acted in real life while on set. And while it is definitely possible that the story and character were dramatized for entertainment, I think Hansen and To Catch A Predator were used as vessels and symbols to tell a much bigger story.
I don’t personally believe the portrayal was entirely negative. Lance Oppenheim describes Hansen as “a hero, a complicated hero, like Odysseus in The Odyssey. He’s a human with flaws setting out to do something noble, and the effects of capitalism and commercialism make for a confusing experience for him.” His description of the character really shows how Primetime wasn’t meant to be malicious. It was a story being told using more of the idea of Chris Hansen, rather than a traditional biopic that follows someone’s life almost exactly.
Many people assumed that Primetime would be a hate-piece towards Hansen, or somehow pro-predator. However, when I watched it, I thought the complete opposite. While the average person probably wouldn’t act as obsessive and controlling as Hansen does in the movie, there is no real point in time where you don’t understand where he’s coming from. Not only is there so much at stake for Hansen, but when you’ve built an entire life on this never-ending chase, what else can you do but run as fast as you can? Not to say Hansen is particularly relatable, but you understand his motivations completely.
Primetime is not a biopic, and I think if you go into the theater expecting that, you’ll be disappointed. What the film offers is a stylized, detailed examination on obsession, exploitation, and ethics in a televised age, using Hansen and To Catch A Predator as a character and a setting. Primetime, ultimately, succeeds in its thematic depth rather than being a standard biopic, and transforms Chris Hansen into a complex mirror to media-obsessed culture.