“What are you doing here?” Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) asks a man in a kitchen at the start of Primetime.
What are you doing here? That’s a question that several people struggle to answer over the course of the film. The man in the kitchen really doesn’t have an answer, though we know that he’s there because he thought he would be meeting an underage person for sex. And we know that Hansen is there because he’s the host of To Catch a Predator, a show that a lot of people now pretend they didn’t watch even though we all did.
What are you doing here? That’s a question that Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo) also struggles to answer throughout the film. When we first see Dan, he’s being filmed as he explains that he doesn’t have an agent and that he’s not in the union but he has done some commercial work. Dan doesn’t know what he’s auditioning for. It’s only after he’s cast that he learns that he’s been cast not for his musical theater background but instead because he can convincingly pass for a 13-year-old. While the members of an organization called Perverted Justice entice pedophiles to come visit them at their “home,” Dan is the one who actually greets them at the door and gets them to come inside so that they can be confronted by Chris Hansen and his camera crew. At first, Dan feels awkward about being a decoy. Then, after one pedophile exposes himself, Dan is frightened by it. Chris’s producer, Andie (Merritt Wever), encourages Chris to take Dan under his wing as a protégé in order to keep Dan with the show. Soon, Dan is approaching his decoy work like an actor preparing for a great stage role.
What are we doing here? That’s the question that Andie wonders when Chris insists on filming an episode in the suburbs of Texas instead of on the then-hot Jersey Shore. Chris has been told by Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher), the founder of Perverted Justice, that he’s tracked down a pedophile who has political connections. Chris and Xavier are hoping for a Congressman or maybe someone even bigger. (When Andie expresses some reservations at not knowing for sure who they’re going after, “sensitive” guy Xavier descends very quickly into misogyny.) Instead, they have to settle for an assistant district attorney named Bill Conradt (Alex Winter). When Conradt, after talking to Dan on the phone and promising to come meet him at the house, fails to show up, Chris and Andie decide to confront Conradt at his home.
What am I doing here? Andie asks herself perhaps more than anyone else in the film. Having been with To Catch a Predator since the beginning, she’s been offered a chance to skip over to another network and produce a show called What Would You Do? What Would You Do? copies To Catch a Predator‘s humiliation format but instead of targeting pedophiles, it targets people who fail to return a wallet or who don’t speak up when an actor says something insensitive. If To Catch A Predator can at least claim to be putting bad people in jail, What Would You Do? can’t even pretend that it’s making the world a better place. Primetime suggests that humiliation, and not justice, was the true lifeblood of To Catch a Predator.
What are we doing here? That’s the question that the audience is forced to consider. Did we watch To Catch a Predator because we wanted to see bad people arrested or did we watch it because we enjoyed watching someone realize, on camera, that his life was essentially over? And are we watching Primetime because we’re interested in what it has to say about the show and the man at the center of it or are we watching because we’re nostalgic for the show that abruptly ended after Bill Conradt shot himself in his home? Did we watch originally because we were worried about the dangers of online predators or did we watch so we could laugh?
Primetime raises a lot of questions and, to its credit, it doesn’t offer up any easy answers. Indeed, it’s brave enough to admit that there is no either/or. Yes, To Catch a Predator‘s main appeal might be the spectacle of humiliation but that doesn’t mean that the men who appeared on the show weren’t deserving of it. The film’s ambiguity extends to its portrayal of Bill Conradt, who talks to someone whom he believes to be underage on the phone but who apparently changes his mind about going to the address that he’s given. Conradt suddenly finds himself staring out of his office window at an army of cops and cameramen. Earlier one of those cops is shown getting a Subway sandwich and glancing at a poster celebrating Jared Fogle. As Jeff Zucker (poorly playing himself) puts it to Chris Hansen, To Catch a Predator may be a sleazy show but it’s what America wants.
With the exception of Zucker, the entire cast is impressive. Not surprisingly the film is dominated by Robert Pattinson, who plays Chris Hansen as being neurotic and obsessive. While Hansen grills the men unlucky enough to be caught on camera and asks them how their families would feel, he cheats on his wife with another woman and his idea of a family night is to gather his kids in the living room so they can watch him on TV. Hansen enjoys his fame and he enjoys playing the righteous avenger but he’s full of envy for “serious” journalists like Stone Phillips (played, with the appropriate amount of smug smarminess, by Bill Heck). In one of the film’s strangest moments, he tells Dan about going to India and confronting an “ancient evil” that retreated into a cave only after the villagers that it tormented started to kill each other. Is Hansen telling the truth or is he playing a role? Even he doesn’t seem to know for sure.
The film starts out as a stylized and darkly humorous look at fame and the media in America. However, as it progresses, Primetime takes on the elements of a filmed nightmare, with Hansen moving through the shadows like an almost soulless demon. What is he doing there? By the end of the movie, not even Chris Hansen seems to know for sure.
