‘Primetime’ Is a Thought-Provoking Media Satire Weighed Down by Its Own Style
To Catch a Predator seems to be one of those shows every American knows by heart, and I’ve never seen a single minute of it. As far as I can tell, it never really aired outside the US, so the show, its host, and the whole cultural conversation around it passed me by completely. I went into Primetime blind story-wise, with no idea who the man at its center was or why his face became so famous.
What I did know was who was involved. Robert Pattinson was in the lead, and he’s been part of some of my favorite films of the last few years, from The Lighthouse to The Batman and this summer’s The Odyssey. Lance Oppenheim was directing. I didn’t know his documentary career at all, though I’d heard a lot of incredible things about his latest doc. This is his first fiction feature, but I walked in expecting good things.
[Warning: spoilers from Primetime are below!]
Catching predators in primetime
Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) has turned catching predators into a television event. For Dateline NBC, he and his producer, Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), set up sting houses. Xavier Von Erck (Matt Maher) handles the online chats that lure men in, decoys like Del (Phoebe Bridgers) play the kids they think they’re meeting, and every man who shows up finds a camera crew and Hansen waiting for him.
The show works so well that the network moves it to primetime, against Lost, and that means it needs bigger and more shocking catches. Hansen brings in a new decoy, Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo), an aspiring actor who takes the gig partly for the union card and has no idea what it’ll cost him. Meanwhile, the pressure on the show grows, and Hansen’s life away from the cameras starts to come apart.
Thought-provoking themes, heavy-handed direction
Pattinson is what everyone will talk about first, and that’s fair. I have no point of reference for how close he gets to the real Hansen since I’ve never seen the man before, so I can only judge him as a character. On those terms, it’s a transformative performance. It starts with the stare, held a beat too long in almost every conversation, as if he’s already decided you’re guilty. Then there’s the self-righteousness, which he wears so comfortably that Hansen never seems aware of it. Add that clipped, rehearsed way of speaking and you get something strangely hypnotic. Even when he’s just going over chat logs, he pulls the scene toward him.
How Primetime treats him is where I’m less sure of myself. Oppenheim shoots Hansen more and more like a monster as the story goes on. The camera crowds his face, the cold, grainy image drains the warmth out of him, and there’s something almost Dracula-like in how he looms over the men he confronts. The idea is clear: hunting becomes an appetite of its own. A man who builds his identity around catching monsters starts to need them, needs the applause, needs to be the one who saved the day. His insistence that things would’ve gone much worse without him sounds heroic early on and more self-serving later. I get the argument, and parts of it land. But whatever his ego and his methods, Hansen is still stopping men who drove to a house expecting to meet a child. That’s important work, and the movie sometimes seems more interested in his vanity than in that. I’m still not sure how I feel about it.
Underneath that is a sharper target: justice turned into a product. Once the show moves to primetime, a sting is no longer just an arrest but an episode that has to win its time slot. The confrontation follows a ritual. Hansen greets the man, asks him to sit down, reveals who he is, and the police wait outside. Rituals make great television because the audience knows every beat and tunes in to watch it play out again. What follows is predictable and still unsettling. If ratings depend on spectacle, the show needs stranger, more sensational catches, and who it goes after starts to depend on what will play well on air. Andie is the one who always knows what will score.
There’s also the question of who’s actually performing. Dan is literally an actor, hired to sound like a teenager on the phone and to look like one at the door, and he hopes the job will move his career forward. Del has been playing the same part for longer. Hansen considers himself a journalist, yet every gesture he makes on camera feels rehearsed, and the men in the kitchen start acting innocent the moment they realize they’re being filmed. Nobody in Primetime is fully themselves when the camera is on, and the cameras are almost always on. Oppenheim’s background in documentaries probably explains why he’s so drawn to the gap between what’s real and what gets staged for an audience.
Gisondo is the heart of that idea, and his is the performance I keep coming back to. He steals quite a few scenes from Pattinson, which is no small feat given how much space the latter takes up. Dan starts out eager and a little naive, proud to have a job that feels important. Gisondo lets the weight of it settle on him slowly, until his early humor starts to curdle into something more troubled. Near the end, he and Hansen have a conversation in which it becomes clear they have very different definitions of what “bad” means. It’s my favorite scene in the film. It’s also the last major dialogue, and it plays like the real climax of what Primetime has been trying to say, more than any of the events around it.
That conversation is why I liked this movie more than its flaws might suggest. Almost no one here is simply good. Hansen catches predators and keeps neighborhoods safer, but he’s also cheating on his wife and barely present for his family. Dan wants recognition so badly that when it doesn’t come, he takes it out on a friend who doesn’t deserve it. Andie keeps steering toward whatever rates, even when she knows better. Even one of the men the show goes after is presented as someone whose profession supposedly made him an asset to his community. Some of these failings are small, a careless remark here or a cruel little comment there, and some are genuinely despicable. Primetime keeps putting them side by side and asking where the line actually is. Who gets to call someone bad, and on what scale?
I understand why some people see the lack of a clear moral stance as a problem. At one point, the film puts an affair between adults and the pursuit of a child on something close to the same moral spectrum. That’s a troubling comparison to make, even through a character’s mouth, because those two things aren’t remotely the same. Still, I don’t need Primetime to tell me what to think. It hands the judgment to us, and with characters this compromised, that’s more provoking than a neat conclusion would have been.
Some of the technical choices work really well for me. The boxy, nearly square frame keeps Pattinson’s face uncomfortably close, and the whole image has a grainy, sickly blue tint. Oppenheim constantly mixes screens and textures: monitors, broadcast footage, and shots that look like they came off a mid-2000s camcorder. The image quality genuinely resembles the television of that era. These choices make sense. This is a story about a TV show and about people watching people, so building it out of the screens and textures of how we watched back then supports the narrative instead of just decorating it.
That makes the rest of the direction more frustrating. This is probably a hot take since many of the people who loved Primetime seem to love it mainly for its style, but the direction is where the movie loses me most. Oppenheim’s fingerprints are on every frame. There’s the flashy, multicolored lighting, the off-kilter angles, the showy transitions, and the dream-like visions that pop up only to repeat what the story has already made clear. It’s a case of style over substance, with one difference: I actually believe the substance is there. The script has the right ingredients, the themes connect naturally with what the characters are going through, and the cast is more than strong enough to carry it. None of those tricks were needed on top, and more often than not they distract from the very ideas they’re supposed to elevate.
There’s also a contradiction I couldn’t shake. This is a real man, a real show, and real crimes involving extremely serious subject matter. Wrapping all of that in so much visual noise pushes it toward pure fiction, complete with a Dracula-like protagonist and a symbolic flashback that adds nothing the film hadn’t already established. The heavier the stylization gets, the more jarring that clash feels. It’s a little ironic that I’ve seen people talk about their “favorite shot” in Primetime. For me, the line or the conversation is what should be remembered. Story will always matter more than visuals, and here the most memorable thing on screen is a line of dialogue.
The cast is excellent across the board. Bridgers is confident in her first acting role, and Matt Maher, Bokeem Woodbine, and Anna Faris all make an impression in smaller parts. Wever is good as Andie, giving her a dry, no-nonsense authority that makes her the most practical person in every room. Twice, though, the sound mix buries her so badly that it sounds like she’s barely whispering. Part of the blame goes to the score, which is ominous and builds a genuinely uneasy mood in places but often tries to do too much, swelling and glitching over scenes and even stepping on line deliveries.
Not taking a moral stance and having an unclear point of view aren’t the same thing, and Primetime does suffer from the second. Beyond the questions it leaves to us, it isn’t always sure what it wants to say about Hansen, the show, or the people watching. So it repeats itself, circling back to points it has already made instead of digging deeper, and I wish it had spent less energy on technical flair and more on that. It’s heavy-handed, too, and it dramatizes some moments more than they need. As someone who knew nothing about Hansen or his show, I’d also have liked a bit more context. If I’d grown up with To Catch a Predator, I’d probably have found even more to enjoy here.
Final thoughts on Primetime
Primetime is a thought-provoking, well-acted look at a TV phenomenon I knew nothing about, and I liked it just enough. Robert Pattinson is transformative and hypnotic as Chris Hansen, even if I’m not convinced by how monstrous the movie makes him. Skyler Gisondo steals several scenes, and Merritt Wever is good as Andie, though the sound drowns her out a couple of times. The boxy frame, the grainy blue, and the early-2000s textures suit a story about television. Its questions about justice as entertainment, performance versus truth, and what really counts as “bad” gave me plenty to chew on. Lance Oppenheim’s heavy-handed direction is what holds it back. The flashy lighting, dream-like visions, and overbearing score keep distracting from a script that already had what it needed, and the stylization clashes with the seriousness of the real story. It also repeats itself, offers little context for newcomers, and isn’t always clear about its point of view. Still, what stayed with me was a conversation about what “bad” means, and I’d take that over any of its shots.
Primetime is currently playing in theaters! Have you had a chance to see this film yet? If so, what did you think about their portrayal of these events? Share your thoughts on social media and tag @bsb.insider to keep the conversation going!
