To Catch a Predator ran from 2004 to 2008 and averaged 7 million viewers an episode at its peak. That number matters because it is not a number about crime prevention — it is a number about entertainment. Lance Oppenheim's Primetime, which opened in the US this week with a UK release on 30 October, takes that distinction seriously in a way the original programme never did. The film opens with a man from Long Beach, California, arriving to have sex with someone he believes is a 13-year-old girl. Chris Hansen walks in. The man's stomach drops. Hansen's line — 'There used to be a pillory in every village. Now, there's a television in every living room' — is the film's thesis delivered in a single sentence, and Robert Pattinson reportedly delivers it with full awareness of its weight. The real Hansen, 67, has called the film an 'insult' and 'identity theft' without having seen it, and has reportedly bought advertising to counter the release. The backstory is more complicated than Dateline NBC's own version ever acknowledged. Perverted Justice, founded by Xavier Von Erck, supplied the operational infrastructure: volunteers posing online as children aged 10-15, chat-log screening, and the in-house operatives Frag and Del Harvey who worked inside the sting locations. Von Erck claims more than 600 convictions and a 99.1% conviction rate, and defends the legal architecture by pointing out that not one conviction based on Perverted Justice evidence was overturned on appeal. He also claims a Dateline NBC producer suggested having a target enter a hot tub with a female decoy — a suggestion his team rejected. Without his organisation, Von Erck says flatly, 'there was no To Catch a Predator possible at that time. It would have been a tall reporter standing inside of a house interviewing no one.' The operation's most consequential moment arrived in 2006 in Rockwall County, Texas. Bill Conradt, an assistant district attorney, allegedly contacted a decoy posing as a 13-year-old boy but then pulled back. The Dateline NBC team pursued the operation to his home with a local SWAT team. Conradt shot himself as the team entered, with the television crew waiting outside. The resulting lawsuit was settled out of court. Luke Dittrich's 2007 Esquire article, Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die, documented what happened and became a key source for the film's screenplay. By 2008, the show was cancelled. The film's most interesting ethical layer is not whether the targets were guilty — former Kentucky attorney general Greg Stumbo, who ran parallel state-led stings resulting in more than 20 arrests, makes clear he has zero sympathy for the men caught — but whether the television apparatus around the sting operation was ever about child protection at all, or whether it was always about ratings. David Osit, director of the acclaimed 2025 documentary Predators, frames it precisely: 'In our deepest hearts we are voyeurs and we enjoy discomfort from a safe vantage point and that's what the show was able to offer people.' Oppenheim's film appears to be asking whether we should be comfortable having enjoyed it. Von Erck is furious about the film's portrayal of him and his organisation, claiming the filmmakers invented scenes, statements, and locations involving him, and that every detail attributed to him in reviews is something he 'did not do, things I never said, and places I never was ever even physically at.' Hansen, meanwhile, has suggested Denis Leary would have been better casting than Pattinson, which is its own kind of statement about how the real protagonists of this story understand what the film is doing to them. The Guardian made repeated attempts to contact director Oppenheim and screenwriter Ajon Singh without success. What Primetime is doing — using a disgraced network television franchise as the chassis for an argument about public punishment, media complicity, and the industrial manufacture of moral certainty — sits in a lineage that runs from Network through The Act of Killing to the best long-form true-crime documentary work of the last decade. Whether the film executes that argument as well as its premise deserves is something the critical record will settle. The raw material is exceptional.
