‘Primetime’ Reveals the True Predator

In 1976, Paddy Chayefsky gave us a warning in Network that most people thought was so fanciful and ludicrous it would never happen. The film told the story of a man unraveling in real time on TV. Instead of getting him the relief and help he needed, television executives turned him into a star.

No one cared about who he was, who he would become or what the glare of the spotlight does to a human being. The concern was ratings. 

Eyeballs. Revenue. No one cared what the network’s choices were doing to people or nations.

This is at the heart of Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime.

The film stars Robert Pattinson as To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen. Its story centers on the brief period when Predator pursued becoming America’s No. 1 show.

Predator showed men who were caught soliciting minors for sex. Producers deployed a decoy to entice the men into coming inside a home. There, they were greeted by Hansen, who revealed sexually explicit messages and interrogated the offenders before they were arrested.

To Catch a Predator was a brief phenomenon. It brought to light a long-practiced evil that the internet had brought to the surface. And though its themes are many, Primetime is ultimately about evil, the nature of evil and what drawing near to evil does to the human soul.

Before Predator, Hansen won an Emmy for reporting on children forced into labor in India. This work was a high that the film suggests he’s never stopped chasing. He came home pursuing a monster he deeply believes is cursing children around the world. Hansen is haunted by evil.

Even more insightful is the moment Hansen confronts a rabbi whom Predator has trapped.

Hansen tells the rabbi to sit. He doesn’t ask. He commands. The rabbi refuses.

In a critical moment, the rabbi grabs Hansen’s wrist. Soon after, we see Hansen scrubbing his wrists as though he is Lady Macbeth.

Hansen’s producer questions his fastidiousness, but dirt and grime were not his problem. Hansen had been touched by the evil he was ostensibly trying to eradicate from the world.

But that is the message in miniature. No human can stand that close to evil without being affected.

Though Primetime takes liberties with Hansen’s personal life, the Predator descends into his own kind of evil in his pursuit of justice. He embraces darkness in service of the light.

The reason humanity needed Jesus to conquer sin and death—and, in some traditions, to descend into hell—is that humans are so frail that we cannot brush against maleficence without at least some of it attaching itself to us.

Primetime is a meditation on evil and darkness rarely walks in the front door and announces itself. The first psalm reminds us, “Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers” (Psalm 1:1, NRSV).

Yet we are not above the indictment on the screen. Many of us cheerfully leered at To Catch a Predator, celebrating sexual predators getting their comeuppance. 

We were entertained by deviance. And that is something we should accept about our own darkness.

Primetime is neither about Chris Hansen nor would-be child molesters. It’s about you and me and what we embrace as entertainment as long as someone else is being ruined. It is Network’s grandchild, a grandchild born of America’s lust for the spectacular and our appetite for the despicable.

Chayefsky’s Network saw that marriage 50 years ago. We did not listen. Instead, we tuned in.