Undoubtedly, TO CATCH A PREDATOR was one of the more provocative shows ever to appear on television, concerning the arrests of awful men who tried to arrange meetings with children for sex that they had chatted with online. The show mixed morality with luridness, and was compelling television, no doubt about it. Still, as unseemly as the show could often be, it did expose a dangerous trend of predators using online chat rooms to prey on those under age, while serving as a cautionary tale for a blithe society not yet familiar with the name Jeffrey Epstein and the likes of such child abuse, trafficking, etc.
The new sociological thriller PRIMETIME tells the story of host Chris Hanson and his production team putting together the show and finding skeevy men to lure into a hoped-for tryst, only to be confronted and scorned on videotape before they were arrested for their perverted behavior. This film could have been a fascinating behind-the-scenes story about how a news division got involved in such sting operations, and how the show was all put together, but instead the film wants to present the news folks as sleazebags as well.
Hanson is presented as a strident crusader, self-absorbed and obsessed with ratings, and his crew as driven to do almost anything to make the story as churlish as possible, all the while hoping to bring down authority figures hypocritically caught up in a world of online sex and meet-ups. But almost from the get-go, the skeevs behind the show seem to be almost equated with the pervy men their show tried to bring down.
Really? That’s the POV of PRIMETIME?
Granted, the show never was Pollyanna-ish to begin with, as Hanson read transcripts of the chats that were borderline X-rated. (Included here.) The humiliation of the predators getting caught for the TV cameras went on and on in the show, feeling excessive and exploitative. And the way the show was filmed, edited, and scored felt as voyeuristic as these screwed-up men fantasizing about potentially having sex with children. Additionally, Hanson was hardly the wide-eyed boy scout he presented onscreen, and a certain amount of scandal – namely infidelity via sexting to third parties – ended up tripping up his career. Certainly, NBC knew that such unsavory reality programs like TO CATCH A PREDATOR were both critiquing and reveling in such tawdriness, yet the network dove into the fray headfirst and with little subtlety. But still, as presented here, the production team is painted as corner-cutting, sniggering, and close to amoral, barely professional or journalistic.
It all makes for a very uncomfortable film, with no one to root for or truly identify with as the one-note narrative – everyone is disgusting – drags on and on. The skeevy notes keep getting hit repeatedly, with little advancement in the form of its narrative. The tale becomes almost redundant. Predators bad. TV, also bad.
Arguably, there is no real arc for any of the characters either, as PRIMETIME reaches its conclusions about all the characters involved here almost by the end of the first act. Despite strong performances by Robert Pattinson as the self-absorbed and maniacally driven Hanson, Merritt Wever as his cold-hearted producer, and Skyler Gisondo as the young adult actor hired to play one of the decoy underage boys, they don’t have a whole lot of range to play. Certainly, little in the way of character growth.
The film, written far too bluntly by Ajon Singh, based on an article by Luke Dittrich, and directed with the heaviest of hands by Lance Oppenheim, takes an hour and fifty minutes to hammer home the same points exhaustively. It results in far too much of PRIMETIME becoming repetitive, to the point of boredom. Making it even more unwatchable is cinematography that strives to be ugly with grainy stock, blown-out colors, and far too many scenes shot in a heavy rain at night. And the sound design and underscore feel more like those suited for a horror movie.
At the end of the day, this seems to be another in a long line of films that indict the TV industry, from NETWORK to THE TRUMAN SHOW to NIGHTCRAWLER. Granted, television, and Tinseltown, for that matter, have obvious shortcomings, but it is simply too cliched to always showcase TV as the “big bad.”The industry, like any part of society, contains plenty of miscreants and avenues of danger, but this cautionary tale is presented with so little nuance that it seems less like a genuine expose and more like overblown satire.
PRIMETIME is a bad time, made all the worse by tedium.
