New drama Primetime, starring Robert Pattinson, examines the polarising television format built around sting operations targeting suspected abusers. A major ratings success at the time, the series also prompted lasting arguments over media ethics.

In November 2004, a confrontational new feature called To Catch a Predator appeared on NBC’s current affairs programme Dateline. Presented like a standard investigative report, it showed a television crew stationed at a suburban house, waiting for unfamiliar men to turn up.

These visitors, however, were not there by chance. They had been contacted by an online vigilante group calling itself Perverted Justice, which sought to expose people believed to be pursuing minors. An adult performer posing as a teenager greeted them at the door. Concealed cameras recorded what followed, until host Chris Hansen emerged to challenge the men over their online messages. Police officers waited nearby to make arrests.

Warning: This article includes references to suicide and sexual abuse that some readers may find upsetting.

To Catch a Predator rapidly became a US television phenomenon. Combining investigative reporting with the spectacle of reality television, it repelled and fascinated audiences, eventually drawing around seven million viewers per episode. Hansen’s programme muddied the lines between journalism, law enforcement and entertainment, offering a troubling form of public punishment and humiliation. It soon moved into the prized 21:00 slot, competing against ABC’s acclaimed drama Lost. This is the world introduced in Primetime, a provocative film inspired by the disputed programme.

In a performance already attracting awards attention, Robert Pattinson channels the particular confidence and intensity associated with Hansen. Before the predator stings, Hansen had worked as an investigative reporter. A year before the first broadcast, he took part in an operation in Cambodia that exposed men exploiting children through sex trafficking. That report became a model for the later series set much closer to home.

“This was a remarkable point in western culture, when children were growing up online for the first time,” David Osit, director of the 2025 documentary Predators, has said. “Young people were using the internet in an unusually unregulated environment, and then adults discovered what was happening. It frightened them.”

“This was a remarkable point in western culture, when children were growing up online for the first time,” David Osit, director of the 2025 documentary Predators, has said. “Young people were using the internet in an unusually unregulated environment, and then adults discovered what was happening. It frightened them.”

As his film explains, Osit survived child sexual abuse himself and first became interested in Hansen’s programme in his twenties, partly as a way of trying to understand the behaviour of offenders. Later, after discovering online fan communities devoted to To Catch a Predator, he decided to make Predators. Its final section includes interviews with Hansen, who says his work was intended to support survivors and serve a wider social good.

There had already been a template for this approach in Cheaters, a reality show that began in 2000 and staged investigations into unfaithful partners. “The basic idea was close: viewers could submit a partner to be exposed for cheating,” says cultural journalist Louis Staples. “It was strangely compelling television, transforming private betrayal into highly public shame and revenge.”

Yet Hansen’s series arguably helped push reality television further into sensational territory, after an earlier generation of programmes framed as social experiments, including Big Brother and Survivor. “To Catch a Predator belongs to what I think of as reality TV’s Wild West period,” Staples argues. “By around 2004, increasingly extreme, spectacle-led formats were appearing, such as the disturbing cosmetic-surgery makeover show The Swan and the dating series There’s Something About Miriam.” In that sense, the programme reflected a wider escalation in the genre, where almost any subject could be used to generate attention and ratings.

The format routinely involved Hansen reading explicit chat exchanges aloud to the people he confronted, often followed by sharp or mocking responses. Before he appeared, decoys sometimes encouraged the visitors to make sexual remarks or expose themselves on camera. Perhaps the most striking feature of To Catch a Predator was the way its lurid material and taunting style were presented as a form of moral or social justice.

“Paedophilia, child exploitation and trafficking become politically powerful subjects because they are extraordinarily easy issues for people to align themselves with,” says Osit. Although he is a survivor of child sexual abuse, he received death threats for challenging Hansen’s approach and for including more sympathetic unaired footage of alleged offenders obtained through public-records requests. Some clips showed them pleading, discussing mental health struggles or expressing regret. “It is a very simple good-versus-evil story, even though society has played a huge role in creating a culture that openly sexualises young people and teenagers.” Predators also considers the sexualisation of teenage stars, including Britney Spears, during that period.

“As a society, we do not tend to think child predators deserve protection,” Osit adds. “We often refuse to see them as human, so there is little concern for their privacy or identity. But once we decide that one group does not deserve protections, it becomes easier to argue that other groups do not deserve them either.”

One especially tragic incident drew attention to the programme’s ethical complications. In 2006, a sting was planned in Texas involving assistant district attorney Louis William “Bill” Conradt. When he did not arrive at the arranged location, Hansen’s crew and police officers, armed with a quickly issued warrant, went to his home. Soon afterwards, Conradt died by suicide. His sister later brought a $105m lawsuit against the show, which was resolved through an out-of-court settlement.

Osit’s documentary details the close relationship between Hansen’s operation and local police. Officers were reportedly paid for appearing in the programme and frequently wore cameras, before body cameras became commonplace, to provide stronger footage. In 2021, Hansen said Conradt had possessed child sexual abuse material, a claim challenged in reporting on the case. He described the death as difficult but said he did not feel personally responsible, suggesting Conradt may have feared facing the consequences.

NBC ended the original To Catch a Predator strand in 2008, but its attention-driven formula has continued in closely related forms. Hansen later returned with Takedown with Chris Hansen, a standalone series available on the streaming service he helped launch in 2022. At the same time, imitators have multiplied across video platforms and social media.

“Today, anyone can potentially make this kind of content with a phone,” says Staples, referring to documentaries that have explored contemporary online sting culture. “We may like to believe that we have outgrown To Catch a Predator, but the attention economy shows that people are still drawn toward similarly extreme material online.”

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“Looking at today’s online world, a sense of vigilante justice supports a great deal of viral content. My feed is full of clips showing people removed from planes for bad behaviour, or being attacked after making racist remarks in public. The appeal is the idea that bad people are receiving their punishment, that justice is being served. It clearly remains an effective way to drive engagement.”

In Predators, Osit interviews Skeet Hansen, a fan and impersonator of the original presenter who sees no issue with earning money by publicly confronting suspected predators. “Some people regard Hansen as a real monster,” Osit says. “Others consider him a hero. I think it depends on what you believe about humanity, about vulnerable people, and about the power structures within society.”

Whether seen as exploitative entertainment or as a genuine instrument of accountability, To Catch a Predator and similar formats still provoke fierce disagreement. Primetime has prompted comparable divisions. Alongside enthusiastic reviews, critics have accused it of being shallow in its treatment of superficial culture, while Hansen has condemned it as exploitative fictional drama and said he has considered legal action.

The film raises broader questions about the material audiences willingly watch and help create, as well as the uncertain boundary between reporting and entertainment. Osit says he was conscious of this tension throughout the production of Predators. “Whenever we add music to shape what viewers feel, we are part of that process,” he says. “We are working within a system that tries to inform while also entertaining. What happens when attention becomes revenue? What happens when there is a financial reward for telling the most sordid stories?”

Primetime opens in US cinemas on 25 September and in UK cinemas on 30 October.