Primetime Review

Graphic by Phoebe Stone

As someone too young to have watched How to Catch a Predator, which first aired in 2004 and was cancelled by the time I was born, I never grasped how big of a phenomenon it was. 

That’s why the idea behind Lance Oppenheim’s 2026 film Primetime seemed underwhelming to me at first. What do you do with an entire movie centered on Chris Hansen, the old white guy who hosted How to Catch a Predator? What in the world did he do to deserve this? Are we that desperate for ideas? 

But, lo and behold, cast a blonde, manic Robert Pattinson as Hansen, post an actually interesting trailer and―boom―you’ve successfully gotten me to pay twenty dollars for a ticket. A twenty dollars well-spent, I might add, because I mostly enjoyed Primetime in all its funny, needlessly bizarre qualities. 

Primetime explores Hansen’s descent into madness, starting from his TV slot being moved to prime time—very clever—and ending at his most controversial takedown, centering a Texas district attorney.

The film follows Hansen’s team of plucky personalities: Andie Bender—Hansen’s overworked producer, played by the lovely Merritt Wever—and Decoy Dan—an actor who pretends to be an underage kid to attract predators, played by trampoline-expert Skylar Gisondo. Phoebe Bridgers also features in this movie, strangely enough. Bridgers plays another decoy named Del Harvey, but unfortunately doesn’t get much screen time.

Primetime was endlessly funny. I found myself actively laughing throughout the whole thing. That is thanks to the work of the actors and the script, which reads far more satirical than one would expect. Pattinson, in particular, is ridiculous. He plays Hansen as a crazed, rating-obsessed man on a sugar high alongside Weaver, acting as his patronizing mother, and Gisondo, his awkward, theatre-kid son. Altogether, they tumble and whine, creating an outlandish, indulgent dynamic that serves to highlight the farcical nature that comes with sensationalist television. There is no one to root for in Oppenheim’s world, except maybe for Gisondo’s character. Though he walks away as the only true innocent in the film, I never fully felt for him. 

Another standout from Primetime is its visuals, which may seem obvious, but in today’s climate of dull color-grading and imperceptible night scenes, anything else is a godsend. 

From the very first scene, Oppenheim’s flair for the dramatics is clear. Old cameras are mimicked to replicate the graininess of cable television, and the film’s smaller aspect ratio makes you feel boxed in, almost as if you’re watching it all unfold on TV. The colors are also tremendous—moody blues, reds, and greens that evoke neon street lights and seem to trap the characters in their theatrical settings. 

The visuals point to a fanatic obsession with cathartic suffering. The tight close-ups, the emphasis on eyes and mouths, especially of the predators themselves, reveal a morbid delight in retributive justice—in capturing the exact moment when someone realizes they are, without a doubt, screwed. This, paired with the underlying background of the Iraq War, coverage of which permeates the television screens, makes for an interesting correlation. 

Oppenheim seems to be making a statement about America post-9/11. Namely, how the outrage among government officials and the general public that fueled the Iraq War and a search for weapons of mass destruction helped produce a society fixated on surveillance. In an attempt to shield ourselves from the danger around us through manhunts and constant surveillance, we’ve created a culture that thrives on chasing the vindictive glee of lashing out at perceived threats, no matter how big or small. 

It’s certainly compelling to explore this idea through Hansen’s own obsession with reining in the forces of evil—in this case, the pedophiles he targets. The result is relevant commentary on modern society’s compulsion to capture everything on a screen, and then turn it all into an “event.”

At the same time, Primetime’s strengths are also its biggest weaknesses. Primetime soars in its visual storytelling; however, the story itself falls flat. 

Throughout the film, we are given three narrative threads, the main one being Hansen’s failing marriage coinciding with his lower ratings, which spirals into a desperate attempt to capture a pedophilic district attorney. The other two narratives consist of Bender’s dilemma of leaving How to Catch a Predator or staying, and Dan’s struggle with working on the show as an aspiring actor. All of the plotlines remain mostly unresolved by the end of the film. 

I’m not saying the film needed a perfect ending—far from it. I do believe, though, that by focusing heartily on the magnitude of the show and all its dramatics, the characters and their stories suffer. We never have enough time to form a connection to any of the plotlines presented above, or feel for the characters as people. To me, they seemed to be caricatures that needed to be filled in—Hansen, especially, becomes nothing but a distraught ringmaster by the end.

While I understand that the characters are supposed to be flawed, there must be a way to make them feel real or, at the very least, more interesting. Instead, I walked out of Primetime thinking more about the spectacle of it all. The characters were footnotes, their lives and personalities amounting to nothing of substance. 

It’s ironic, isn’t it? In a film so focused on how videos and screens strip the humanity of others, it ultimately does the same to its characters, making them flat and inhuman in the wake of a good-looking movie.  

As Hansen famously says in the film: “You see how this looks, right?”

Perhaps that’s the conundrum most films can’t escape these days: in a screen-obsessed world, even a film criticizing our urge to sensationalize everything can’t help but become a spectacle itself.