If Hansen’s gum-smacking producer, Andie Bender (Merritt Wever) doesn’t share her star’s unwavering superiority complex, it’s only because she’s got the ratings in mind. Her only mission is to make the number one show on television. She doesn’t really care about any of the others – not Hansen, Plum, nor ‘Perverted Justice’ mastermind Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher) or decoy Del Harvey (Phoebe Bridgers) – beyond how they serve her career plans. And what career plans they are! Summoned into the office of NBC head honcho Jeff Zucker (playing himself!), Hansen and Bunker are told Predator is moving to the 9pm Wednesday night timeslot. Primetime. Opposite ABC’s juggernaut Lost. “We’re going to be bigger than Lost,” a manically excited Hansen hisses. “BIGGER THAN LOST!”
That’s what To Catch A Predator was about, really. Not about justice, or saving the children, but climbing the ratings and personal glory. When NBC News golden child Stone Phillips condescendingly remarks he’ll be watching the show from Afghanistan you can see the tight set of Hansen’s jaw. This is a man who have never once questioned the morality of his actions and only sees the world in black and white, despite the fact that he recognises the mob justice aspect of To Catch A Predator. “There used to be a pillory in every civilised town,” he tells Dan. “Now there’s a television in every home…and I’m on it.” That’s not shame in his voice. It’s wonder.
While the positioning of Hansen’s extramarital affair as a parallel to the cases on Predator doesn’t quite mesh, the voyeuristic CCTV footage and grainy blown-up early-digicam certainly does, recreating the glory days of reality television that opened Pandora’s Box for our current age of normalised hyper surveillance. Rapid-fire editing gives the sensation of channel-hopping; of the early inklings of the attention economy. It’s not that Oppenheim seeks to eviscerate Hansen or exonerate the lowlifes who took the bait and ended up shaking before him surrounded by cameras – rather, as was the case in his excellent previous work Some Kind of Heaven and Ren Fair, he’s merely looking at the material from a different angle.
When people feel maligned by the institutions supposed to serve and protect them, they have a tendency to reject them entirely. The sort of society that produced To Catch A Predator was one born out of the post-millennium disillusionment that followed 9/11 on a political and social level. Against the backdrop of Primetime, Saddam Hussain’s trial plays out on television. America’s government and media purports the myth that the War on Terror was won – a myth that wouldn’t be dismantled for years. In theory the threat of a television camera should produce the truth; in reality it simply makes the truth easier to obfuscate.
What is the truth about To Catch A Predator? The show broadcast 20 episodes during its tenure, amounting to just under 15 hours of footage total. Bill Conradt shot himself when NBC’s cameras arrived with a SWAT team on his doorstep; he never made any attempt to meet the Predator decoy in person. There is still debate over whether or not CSAM was found on his devices. Dan Schrack, the decoy actor who was previously communicating with Conradt, felt personally responsible for his suicide. Chris Hansen went on to front a host of true crime shows, often focussed on child predators. He was parodied several times on Family Guy; To Catch A Predator became a meme more than it was ever a child protection operation. YouTube and TikTok have become the new pillory. A new generation of “PedoHunters” who worship Hansen take their cues from the pioneer to lure alleged sex offenders in via social media and online games such as Roblox so they can post dramatic confrontation videos for fame and financial gain.
Primetime is as much about the voracious societal appetite for blood and guts journalism and the evasive concept of criminal justice in an unjust world as it is Hansen and his unwavering certainty of his own righteousness, but his fascinating looming figure serves as a simulacrum for those who believe To Catch A Predator was a success, doing what the legal system wouldn’t or couldn’t despite a lack of legal authority. By replicating the can’t-look-away atmosphere that catapulted the show to the top of the ratings at a remove, Oppenheim makes evident that justice can’t be served playing at 9pm up against ABC’s Lost, while putting a worrying lack of media literacy in the firing line. With the television static still crackling, Primetime asks the same question of its audience that Hansen did of all those pathetic men who ended up prostrate before him. You see how this looks, right?