Primetime, documentarian Lance Oppenheim’s narrative-feature debut, is the second movie released in the last year-ish to relitigate one particularly sordid, ethnically smudgy reality-TV show. On To Catch a Predator, which amassed 20 episodes between 2004-07 as an adornment to Dateline NBC, host Chris Hansen and a loyal crew tricked would-be child predators into arrests with the help of decoy actors and an organization called Perverted Justice. The crux of the show might have been more straightforwardly admirable without its deluge of troubling complications. The series’ entrapment-forwardness and unavoidable court-of-public-opinion repercussions made it legally difficult for justice to effectively be served offscreen, for one thing. But when a show with its consequentially serious aspirations just as much sought to flatter the steely image of its host as cherry-pick cases seemingly laden with the most “great television” potential, a salacious line was toed. The well-trod, tangent-littered debate over the show’s intentions and overall efficacy has generally always begun thusly: How much about To Catch a Predator was actually about stopping a horrible crime in its tracks and getting a foul person off the streets, and how much was about, more than anything, attracting high viewership? Was it responsible for those two impulses to be wrapped up in each other in the first place?
Last year’s Catch reexamination, the chilly and insightful David Osit-directed documentary Predators, used interviews with Hansen, his collaborators, commentators, and a heap of archival footage to make sense of the pop-cultural context that made the show appointment television for some and the lurid influence on the true-crime genre it helped shape. Though it pays brief lip service to the nascent reality-TV craze of the aughts and war-fostered effects on the national mood, the A24-backed Primetime is oddly disinterested in examining the mid-2000s entertainment landscape and why the series resonated so deeply with audiences. It leans instead on insularly satirizing the cutthroat nature of seamy TV-making and, with great assistance from Robert Pattinson’s psychologically squiggly performance, lampooning Hansen’s unsettling, apparently mirror-rehearsed, and inevitably flawed savior complex.
Read the full review at 425.
Image courtesy of A24
