‘Primetime’ Is Sleazy, Surreal, and Strangely Hollow

Primetime makes its point early and incisively. It’s 2006 and NBC’s salacious hidden camera show To Catch a Predator has been playing like gangbusters, thanks in no small part to the onscreen dramatics of host Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) and his famed “have a seat” catchphrase. The head of NBC (Jeff Zucker amusingly playing himself) doesn’t particularly like the show, but its popularity is too big to ignore. With Seinfeld and Friends over, the Peacock Network is desperate for a buzzy series that can compete in primetime. Zucker turns to the weekday TV schedule to figure out what he wants to put it up against, flitting past One Tree Hill and Grey’s Anatomy to settle on the biggest fish in town: Lost. Hansen is so excited he wakes his kids up in the middle of the night to celebrate.

The point is clear. Hansen and his team turned the hunt for child predators into primetime entertainment, specifically seeking out the most salacious criminals they could find in order to create a spectacle that could compete in the ratings with the polar bears on ABC’s plane crash drama. For all its aims at helping children, there was something kind of gross about the entire To Catch a Predator enterprise, and it’s that sweaty, desperate underbelly that documentary director Lance Oppenheim brings to the surface in his grimy new narrative feature debut.

Yet it’s hard not to feel like there’s a pot-calling-the-kettle-black irony to all of this. After all, what is Oppenheim doing but turning the grossness of To Catch a Predator into entertainment that will surely spend the rest of the year actively campaigning for awards and accolades? (The film already competed for the Golden Lion at Venice.) Much as Hansen invited NBC viewers to ogle child predators, Oppenheim invites us to ogle Hansen and the sordid team of producers, actors, and law enforcement groups that made his work possible. He condemns them for caring more about ratings and acclaim than the human victims in all of this, even as he makes no attempt to fill in the gaps about what the show missed or got right about the realities of child sex abuse and how to punish its offenders and protect its victims. In a very literal sense, no one here is thinking of the children.

Instead, what we get are 110 minutes of neon-soaked surrealism and absurdity, which is often entertaining and sometimes challenging but never particularly insightful. Primetime works best as a showbiz satire, particularly when it comes to orienting To Catch a Predator within a mid-aughts cultural landscape where the violent War on Terror played out opposite a reality TV boom racing to see which show could emerge with the worst taste fastest. It was a gluttonous, indulgent, smooth-brained cultural moment—the kind where Dateline sold branded To Catch a Predator thongs in its online merch store to capitalize on the phenomenon. Soon new kinds of personalities rose to the forefront both behind and in front of the camera, desperate for their five minutes of fame.

That includes Hansen, a one-time serious journalist turned performative sensationalist. Pattinson plays him like a cross between a slick traveling salesman and a gonzo carnival barker, the smarm practically oozing off the screen. It’s a darkly fun performance, although a bit of a cheap one too. Audiences tend to underestimate how easy it is to be weird as an actor and how much harder it is to be human. Here Pattinson is all tics and tricks, without any of the underlying humanity that made his eccentric turns in Mickey 17 and The Lighthouse much more compelling. It doesn’t help that screenwriter Ajon Singh ties Hansen’s slow-burning mental breakdown to a subplot about his extramarital affair leaking to the tabloids, which feels thematically disconnected from everything else going on.

Instead, the more interesting characters are ambitious Dateline producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever) and naïve young actor Dan Plumb (Skyler Gisondo), who signs up to be one of the “decoys” who help lure online child predators into camera-rigged homes where Hansen can surprise them. Unlike Hansen, who’s rendered in one-note sicko mode for pretty much the whole movie, Andie and Dan actually get arcs as they attempt to figure out their own careers in relation to the strange show they’ve tied themselves to.

For Dan, there are at least some ethical concerns at play. His earnest desire to make it as an actor butts up against the reality of what it’s like to become literal bait for pedophiles. Thrust into rooms with unpredictable men, Dan is desperate to impress his bosses (and do whatever he can to score more screen time), even as the bizarre human-to-human interactions start to weigh on his soul. He’s basically the ingénue in a 1930s cautionary tale about the dangers of Hollywood, and Gisondo brings a wet-eyed sincerity that sells the “boiling frog” feeling of how To Catch a Predator slowly slipped beyond its marginally heroic aims into something more sordid.

Most compelling of all is Andie, who has a chilling knack for knowing exactly what people need to hear in order to get them to do what she wants as a producer. It’s a softer depiction of power than the swaggering showmanship of Hansen, which only makes it that much more terrifying. She’s in many ways the biggest villain of the movie even as she’s often the only real voice of reason on the To Catch a Predator set. Casting the soft-spoken, inherently likable Wever is a stroke of genius when it comes to testing our sympathies about what the Dateline show is trying to do and why. It’s a performance very much in conversation with Faye Dunaway’s work in Network, and Primetime might have been a stronger movie if it had put Andie, rather than Hansen, at its center.

Instead, Oppenheim’s main goal seems to be to create a general atmosphere of sickly claustrophobia rather than a particularly insightful character portrait or social commentary. He deploys garish lighting, smeary lenses, era-appropriate film grain, and a 4:3 aspect ratio to box us into a sense of dread that permeates nearly every scene, even when the characters are merely grabbing drinks rather than catching predators. It makes for an effectively unnerving dark comedy that almost becomes a horror thriller by the end. Like the show it's critiquing, however, it feels like the ultimate point of all of this is just more lurid entertainment for a ravenous audience. Only this one happens to be film bros rather than mainstream America.

Primetime opens in theaters on September 25. Caroline Siede is a film and TV critic who runs the newsletter Girl Culture.