Primetime (2006)

In 2006, To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen sets out to make television history.

Director Lance Oppenheim: “I grew up watching network and reality TV in the early 2000s, and wanted to play with its visual language in Primetime. Most reality TV is salacious by design, but few shows have kept their hold on the culture at large, or on my own imagination, the way Dateline’s To Catch a Predator has in the twenty years since it aired. Its host, Chris Hansen, pioneered a spectacle of punishment – the moment moral outrage became must-see TV.
His show always fascinates me, in part because of the way it collapses fiction and reality: the predators are acting on real, horrific impulses, but they are led into a highly constructed environment where they interact with actors and a TV host.
With Primetime, I set out to make an institutional portrait of To Catch a Predator at the height of its success. How did the show change as it grew more popular? What did working on it do to the people inside it – the performers, the producers? I wanted to trace the disparate ambitions of people who existed inside this apparatus – a journalistic crusader, a mercenary TV producer and a wide-eyed Hollywood dreamer – converging into a moment of crisis. And I liked the idea of revisiting the media culture of the early 2000s, before the news landscape fractured, when a “primetime” slot felt like a matter of life or death. For some, it was.”