Movie Review : Primetime (2026)
Everyone hates people who victimize women and children. It’s almost theoretical. If you even try to find excuses for people who do, you're going to get shunned on principle. Because of this widely accepted hard moral boundary, a show like To Catch a Predator was bound to be a success. But it was also unnerving and lead to a Texas assistant district attorney blowing his head off. Lance Oppenheim's movie Primetime is about how weird and surreal that show and its peculiar host were.
Primetime is a movie about To Catch a Predator. It's also mostly about the host Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson), but it almost never delves into his personal life. It's about catching pedophiles, moving up network television's pecking order and catching that slippery recognition of "becoming the talk of the town". There are pedophiles being caught and dragged over hot coals in Primetime, but they almost don’t matter. They’re cannon fodder, almost like nameless casualties in horror movies.
So you’ve been publicly shamed
This is a movie where a high-strung journalist catches predators, but it's not a movie about catching predators. It's a movie about how weird it is to create fake realities to catch real dangerous guys in order to further the career of an even weirder guys who's lost track of who he is. To Catch A Predator is interesting because it broke the boundary between justice and therefore made both concepts way more complicated than they should be. Chris Hansen canceled people (well, criminals) before it was cool.
Patron saint of this site Chuck Klosterman said in his 2021 book The Nineties : "anything experienced through the screen of a television becomes a TV show". This idea resonated with me while watching Primetime because the protagonists in the movie (mostly Chris and Decoy Dan Plum) seemed unclear about what part of their lives was a show and what part was real. Chris in particular lead a secret life himself where he cheated on his wife while playing knight in shining armor on national television.
He's also trying to fight back a National Enquirer investigation aiming to expose an affair he's having on television, so the spectacle has crossed over into his real life as he's become a character in a reality show. These hard boundaries keep crossing in and out, leaving you unsure what’s fair game for network television and what’s sacred. That's why the movie is uneasy without giving you a clear reason why. By intertwining justice and spectacle, the meaning of transgression become unclear.
If everything is fair game for spectacle, everything becomes fair game for justice if they’ve become one and the same. Transgression lose their meaning if the catharsis of seeing a moral truant being punished is the same every time.
When You're Weird
Now, Primetime wouldn't work without Robert Pattinson's gloriously unhinged performance. He's been on serious a roll for a couple years, but this might be his best. There's not a lot to this movie outside of how the meteoric rise in popularity and pressure affects Chris Hansen and how Pattinson is able to let slivers of doubt and shame creep into the negative space between two public appearances is magnetic. His interpretation of Chris Hansen is imprisoned by his own mythology.
Hanson is always performing, but he seems convinced that he never is. That's why, I believe, Primetime is so hyperstylized. The protagonist’s world has become a house of mirror where life and television are always the same. That’s why Pattinson's Chris Hanson is always wearing a costume, always addressing people in the same stern manner and being a character as his real life drifts in and out of focus. At the end of the day, Primetime is about a weirdo calling the shots, so the fit is perfect.
*
Although I sincerely believe Robert Pattinson could be up for an Oscar for Primetime, I don't think it's that great of a movie. He does a lot of the heavy lifting, but it feels like it's missing an act between the rise and the moral downfall of To Catch a Predator. Everything goes really well, really quick and the show turns into a fiasco just about as quick. All of that because Lost was a great show for five seasons. But Primetime works because Pattinson is unsettling enough to make it feel like the mindfuck it was.
7.5/10
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