It’s wild to think how different the world was just twenty years ago. The Internet in the early 2000s was in this weird, fun phase between the DIY ethos of the 1990s and the then-emerging-but-still-scrappy social media juggernauts of today. I first learned about YouTube from a print article in Newsweek, of all places, around that time. Sure, there was content online, but mostly text; slower connections meant that video wasn’t so easily obtained (getting to college in 2003 and experiencing truly high-speed Internet for the first time was life-changing).
In other words, cable television was still king. Indeed, it was something of a golden age—or, perhaps, a dark age—of trashy reality television. Survivor was an international phenomenon. MTV stopped playing music videos and just showed annoying youths screeching at each other in luxury houses. Watching shows about people shopping for houses in those pre-Great Recession days was a national pastime.
In retrospect, reality television was something of a precursor to modern YouTube, in which audiences formed parasocial bonds with television hosts. Sure, the possibility for engagement was far more remote, but people got really into those shows. But the cultural power was far greater, because everything was filtered through the Big Three networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—and a host of related channels. Everyone was talking about, say, Lost or The Office at work; media journalists called these “water cooler shows,” because everyone would discuss them at the water cooler the next day. “Appointment viewing” was another term, because you couldn’t just watch a show whenever you wanted to—you had to watch it live or wait for a rerun. Ergo, if you wanted to be up on things at the water cooler, you had to keep your appointment!
The fewer options combined with rigid airing schedules meant that far more people were watching the same programming. The kind of scattershot fracturing of media we experience now was not really a problem. Sure, there were tons of channels and you could watch one of those instead of whatever the hit show was, and plenty of folks did; but so many people wanted to be in on the conversation. There wasn’t just a parasocial relationship with television hosts or characters; there was a social element to television.
It also meant that shows were competing for eyeballs in the same finite time blocks. TiVo and DVRs alleviated this competition slightly, as you could record one show while watching another in the same block, but it wasn’t like you could hop on YouTube and watch tons of show clips or sports highlight reels or the news.
Little did we realize it at the time, but the era of cable television’s dominance was swiftly ending. For that moment, though, it seemed stronger than ever (perhaps there’s a lesson there), and the competition for the top ratings was fierce.
The king of primetime (or, at least, one of the jester-princes of the era) was investigative journalist Chris Hansen, who’s iconic phrase “why don’t you have a seat” became one of the earliest memes. Those words meant that a degenerate pervert was about to get his comeuppance.
As morally satisfying as the show was, there was always something a bit sleazy about it (and not just because grown men were attempting to engage in illegal acts with minors), and the new A24 film Primetime (2026) explores the darker side of the program.
Before seeing the film, I watched this one-hour documentary from YouTuber Turkey Tom about Chris Hansen, which did a great deal to illuminate the real man behind the show:
That “homework” isn’t required, but it certainly gave me some context for what was going on in the flick. Chris Hansen is a shady character in his own right—a philanderer and something of a con man who seems desperately to want another chance at the glory days of To Catch a Predator—but he’s certainly not worse than the men he helped bring to justice. His life since then, however, has been something of a mess, and his tactics seem to be part of his own moral failures.
The film shows the performative side of Hansen, along with the dark underbelly. It frames Chris Hansen as an obsessed crusader out to vanquish an “ancient evil.” The film moves rapidly from a more grounded presentation of the behind-the-scenes of Predator to a become a fever dream. With threats of a story from The National Enquirer exposing his affair with a younger woman (a real-life affair Hansen had with a thirty-ish news anchor) looming and Predator‘s move to a primetime slot against mega-show Lost, the pressures of his own charade drive Hansen to the brink.
The film also seems to function as a critique of show business and the “do-anything-for-ratings” ethos of the hypercompetitive television world of the early 2000s. Hansen reads the chat exchanges between the pederasts and Predator‘s decoys the ways an actor reads a script—obsessively, repeatedly, feverishly. Is he just practicing so he has a smooth delivery of very grotesque words when confronting a predator in a high-stakes, stressful situation? Or is he practicing so he give the best performance of a man masquerading as a crusader? Or is he a pervert?
The first two seem plausible, and are just variations on a theme; really, it just comes down to motivations: does Hansen believe he’s doing the right thing, or is he doing what he’s doing for the ratings, and getting criminals locked up is just a happy side effect? Again, both seem true. As for whether or not Hansen himself is a perv, that seems unlikely, and I didn’t get that implication from the film. He’s certainly a flawed man, and his obsession—for justice or ratings or both—is so all-consuming, it destroys him. Perhaps his “perversion” is that he’s lost the thread, that he’s made success and his crusading personae into idols.
There’s a great cast in Predator (I thought the Murphy, Texas police chief was Dave Chappelle, but it’s actually Bokeem Woodbine, who looks and acts identically to the famous comedian). Skyler Gisondo (ROFL), who plays “Decoy Dan” or Dan Plum (based on Dan Schrack, a real-life decoy for To Catch a Predator) is riveting as the young man who can tell something is off, but who admires Chris and comes to believe in the show’s mission. The lispy, overweight Matthew Maher is hilarious as the online wizard Xavier Von Erck, the founder of the now-defunct vigilante group Perverted-Justice (also ROFL); the scene where he describes hunting down a prominent perv in Texas is a masterpiece of fevered, inspired ramblings. Merritt Wever is Andie Bender, the show’s producer; she’s something of a paradox, as she’s the “conscious” of the show while also being totally amoral.
One surprise appearance was from Alex Winter, who famously portrayed Bill S. Preston, Esquire, in 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Winter portrays a Texas district attorney involved in online pederasty, the show’s “whale” that Hansen and company hope will catapult the show to the top of the charts.
I don’t want to reveal too much, but Primetime was a riveting film. If you watched a ton of television in the early 2000s (and I did), it will bring back a lot of memories. For anyone that ever watched To Catch a Predator with mixed feelings—relief that pederasts were being arrested and exposed, but a certain squeamishness about the public spectacle of it all—this film will help to explain why that bit of squeamishness existed.
Yours portly recommends 2026’s Primetime.