Primetime (2026) / Predators (2025)

I think I loved Primetime. I was very into its cold, cold '90s color scheme and approach to video and light, and the acting was excellent. In many ways it was styled like something unhinged and surrealist, even though it stays in the real world and never strays into that territory. The whole plot is so vicious, though, and the story of To Catch a Predator so insane, self-serving, and terrible, that watching Primetime always does feel surreal. 

I loved the performances: Robert Pattinson, Merritt Wever (who I don't think I've ever seen in anything before), and Skyler Gisondo are great. (In fact, they're better than great, and Oscar nominations for some of them seem like they really ought to arrive.) And it's always a fun time when Bokeem Woodbine is onscreen. 

For me, Primetime took a really different tack than David Osit's 2025 documentary Predators, which covers much of the same material as Primetime. When I saw Predators earlier this year I found myself filled with rage. 

I assume that Predators—like, I suppose, Primetime—is polarizing subject matter, and so I figure plenty of other viewers will not agree with me, but I think these Chris Hansen shows, the Chris Hansen imitators, and Hansen himself are the lowest of the low. These guys are moralizers who are peddling fear and terror to US American audiences by invoking the fantasy of the vulnerable child (no actual children ever appear anywhere) while disavowing the operations of desire that are at work in themselves. One of Predators' insights is that people want to watch To Catch a Predator and its copycats because they want to feel better about themselves, to place themselves on a moral high ground above people they imagine to be morally irredeemable. It strikes me that a person has to be pretty morally bankrupt already if the only way one can feel superior is to compare oneself to an exploiter of children.

My gripes with Predators were threefold: 1) Osit isn't nearly as hard as he should be on To Catch a Predator; 2) there isn't enough of a critique of sex offender legislation in the film; and 3) there is zero differentiation in the film between "stranger danger" and child predation happening within families or at home (the latter in fact gets no mention at all).

But Lance Oppenheim's approach in Primetime is completely different. Mostly I appreciated that the tack  Oppenheim takes toward Chris Hansen and his merry band. Primetime never once treats these folks as anything other than people making television and attempting to get good ratings. They're not remotely moral crusaders; they're craven television producers and nothing more, and Hansen in particular relishes the language of the men he is busy setting up. The one exception is Matthew Maher's Xavier Von Erck—the guy who founded "Perverted Justice"—who emerges in Primetime as a twisted engine of desire, driving things by spending hours online attempting to seduce other men.