Primetime Review

In 2020, a caller on Iranian state TV said Iran could never retaliate against the USA because America has no real heroes, just characters like SpongeBob and Spider-Man. As I’ve grown older, that thought has stuck with me. I’ve found that the concept of the ‘superhero’ is a uniquely American idea. The individualist – sometimes with help, but even then the public framing is that they (usually he) work alone – who will single-handedly bring a better future for us all. 

What is a superhero if not someone who enacts vigilante justice? Someone who takes matters into his own hands, because the law doesn’t work, but American exceptionalism might. Sure, they might work alongside law enforcement, sometimes go against them, but ultimately, justice is what they make it out to be. Later renditions of the superhero, viewed through a critical lens, interrogate this: “Why do they think they’re the ones who have the right to decide what justice is?”

The most popular (and biggest) superhero through which all of this is viewed is Batman. Famously, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight frames Batman within a fictionalized version of the Patriot Act (enacted after the 9/11 attacks). In Matt Reeves’ The Batman, where Robert Pattinson portrays the titular detective, we see the effect of a lone vigilante enacting vengeance on the population, and how that kind of violence and self-righteous justice might not be the solution for a city of corrupt opportunists preying on the vulnerable.

Lance Oppenheim’s PRIMETIME, starring Robert Pattinson as journalist and television star Chris Hansen, frames Hansen’s reality television show, To Catch a Predator, as another cultural artifact that was born out of America’s need to have heroes, people who will stand up and do the right thing against some sort of evil in a post 9/11 world, critiquing its existence while holding it as the apparatus that has led to a lot of modern sensationalism of taking justice into your own hands in real life, through various instances of ‘predator catchers’. 

The running current through the entire film is this black hole at the center of it all that pulls everyone into it – starting with Hansen, the show’s producer Andie Bender (who is played brilliantly by Merritt Wever), the pedophile catching group Perverted Justice, and later Decoy Dan (played spectacularly by Skyler Gisondo, who is also the surrogate for the audience in ways). It never outright tells the viewer whether what they’re doing here with To Catch a Predator is good or bad; instead, the darkness it leaves in its wake in every moment, in every scene, is what the viewer has to go off of to draw their own conclusions. 

The darkness in particular is crucial to Primetime. In a key moment in the film, as they’re in the dark playing catch, reminiscent of a father with his son, Hansen tells Dan:

“What you’re doing is more than acting. You’re cleansing the world of an ancient evil.”

It’s key because it’s the moment the line already blurred between Hansen and the predators he’s catching finally becomes visible. Sure, they’re the ones who are preying on kids and grooming them; they’re evil, certainly, but is Hansen not a predator too? Isn’t he grooming Dan too, pulling him deeper into the black hole at the center of this sort of production, where the spectacle of defeating evil overrides everything else?

But on top of that, are we, as members of the audience who receive this sort of spectacle, also culpable for it? Are we not enablers, for continuing to consume? Hansen literally has his own streaming platform right now, TruBlu, for true crime content, which he bought advertising space for before showings of Primetime, using the film’s framing of him as a controversial figure and his own distaste for that as a way to manufacture a PR campaign. A constant presence in this film is the push for higher numbers, higher ratings – first introduced by Jeff Zucker (playing himself), the man who oversees Dateline NBC’s programming, and later the push for ratings is what leads to Hansen’s desperation breaking him and thus going for his ‘white whale’, assistant district attorney Bill Conradt (played by Alex Winter). 

And why do we keep engaging in this sort of spectacle? In the film, part of the opening news reporting is of the U.S. military taking down Saddam Hussein – and later on at a police shooting range we see the targets to be pictures of Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. Americans wanted heroes after the tragedy that was 9/11; they wanted justice to be taken by their own hands, to ensure that evil like that didn’t go unpunished. Through the film’s imagery, even though it isn’t spoken outright, Oppenheim, Ajon Singh (screenwriter), and David Bolen (cinematographer) connect the War on Terror to the rise of shows like To Catch a Predator, and why viewers wanted to see retribution on evil on their silver screens.. 

It’s the same thing with superheroes, right? We love seeing these heroes enact justice with their own hands, because sometimes maybe the law isn’t enough. Sometimes vigilante justice is a necessity to do what must be done, to punish those who our society can’t or won’t punish. To circle back to Robert Pattinson’s portrayal of Batman – his arc there is to learn that his way of justice – where he’s fuelled by vengeance, isn’t the way. 

On the flip side, his rendition of Chris Hansen starts at a similar place. Years ago, he investigated missing children in India and encountered a masked evil, which drives him to do what he does today. As is the quote before, he truly believes that what he’s doing is for a greater purpose, that exposing predators the way he’s doing it truly will cleanse the world of evil. 

Unlike Batman, though, Hansen never has an arc of redemption, but is purposefully presented in shades of grey – a complicated man, as it were. He has an affair, he grooms Dan in his own way, and succumbs to the numbers while pursuing his own justice. What I find interesting is the film leaves the audience without telling us what happens next to Hansen or To Catch a Predator, leaving us to our own conclusions. In real life, one of Hansen’s first reactions to Conradt shooting himself is figuring out how to present it to the audience. They are still driven by the same things ultimately, Hansen says in the Predators (dir. David Osit, 2025) documentary that “What I do, is for a greater purpose”, placing himself above his own copycats as he directly works with law enforcement.

The film is more sympathetic to Hansen in this manner. It never goes into how a lot of Hansen’s takedowns led to prosecutors and law enforcement not being able to process charges properly, and thus letting the predators he had taken down run free – to the point where some of them even returned to the show a second time only to get caught by Hansen again. While I find it interesting that Oppenheim and Singh present him in this manner, I find it more interesting that Hansen and some folks still view him as being presented as “evil”, and that’s telling in its own way. 

Yet, the film ultimately manages to complete its throughline, from America needing heroes, to the rise of To Catch a Predator, to our modern surveillance states and more cases of vigilante justice where the image of safety and retribution is given more priority than actually protecting vulnerable people. It doesn’t have to spell out that last bit, but it’s incredibly obvious to anyone, given the show’s success in the film’s universe (and also based on what you engage with in real life). 

David Bolen’s cinematography does a lot of the work to make this effective. I always find it interesting how filmmakers today try to show us a time before now. 2006 in Primetime is how I remember 2006 to be (granted, I was 3 at the time). But if you look at pictures taken then and compare them to the cinematography in this film, you can see a similar texture throughout: the filmic crunch, the slight blue tint in the colours from the lenses and digital processing back then. That’s not all that Bolen has in his repertoire for this film, though. Using a colonoscopy camera to peer inside a character, the flashing imagery for horror scares- it all works so so so so excellently; it’s amazing.

We must all consider justice for the vulnerable, how it is shown to us, and whether or not even if the people who are on the receiving end deserve it, how we glamorize it, and what of the people that allow this glamorization to happen. Even though Primetime doesn’t make that explicit, the emptiness it leaves in the viewer’s spirit in its wake as the credits roll is enough to make one consider these things, and that’s why it’s one of the year’s best in my eyes.