By The Daily Wire (World News) | Created at 2026-09-29 18:19:09 | Updated at 2026-09-29 20:35:45
7 hours ago
I expected to leave the theater feeling icky because of the child-predator premise. Instead, I walked out cringing at how “Primetime” strips Chris Hansen of his moral compass — making the hero seem more sinister than the predators he caught red-handed.
“I think it shows people what Hollywood is really about,” Hansen said on his podcast, “Have a Seat With Chris Hansen.” Maybe that’s no surprise for a film that comes out of the same entertainment machine that propped up Harvey Weinstein. But Hansen claims production company A24 “exploited” his true story for grossly dramatic effect. “You hope people realize that there’s no way it can be true,” Hansen said.
“It was so detached from reality or anything that I’ve ever experienced then or now, doing the investigations, I’m not sure what the point of it was,” he said. “In a way, it’s a hit piece on me and the series. Which is weird because all we do is expose bad human beings who try to hurt children.”
I never watched a full episode of “To Catch a Predator,” but I was familiar with the concept. First airing in 2004, the series hit during the reality TV bubble just as America woke up to the reality of child predators on computers. Even so, I kept wondering, “Is this what Chris Hansen was really like?”
Robert Pattinson’s portrayal does nail Chris Hansen’s particular voice. And there is the catchphrase about taking “a seat right over there” along with the plate-of-cookies bait. But it’s like the entire movie was based on YouTube clips of an undercover decoy calling out “Hey! Come on in!” and offering snacks to a perp who first observes the kitchen like he’s on “House Hunters.”
“Chocolate chip’s my favorite.”
“Mine too,” the high-pitched decoy “teen” voice agrees, off camera.
Even after Hansen enters the scene to make the bust, the target doesn’t always realize plans changed. “Wow, these are home-baked?” one guy asks Hansen, somehow revealing another level of depravity.
But production never tapped into the prime resource for the story: Hansen himself. “It’s kind of weird that A24 would put together a movie using my name, image, and likeness without even consulting me at any point along the way,” Hansen said. “What bothered me most is that it portrayed me as an aloof, detached father to my sons, which is so far from reality.”
In the movie, Pattinson’s character wakes up his two young sons from a deep sleep to plant them in front of a TV to watch his show after it makes the prime time slot. Hansen says the broadcasting schedule storyline was never really a thing — because the show always aired in prime time.
Having been “blown away by the theatricality of how [Chris Hansen] went about dismantling people’s lives” on the original series, “Primetime” director Lance Oppenheim told People that his invented portrayal was actually inspired by a Cameo video message from Hansen that Oppenheim’s wife bought for him. He described it as “this depiction of Chris Hansen that felt almost very heightened, almost like a Brian De Palma movie or an Oliver Stone movie.”
Bits and pieces of the screenplay were true-ish. Hansen’s first marriage to Mary Joan Hansen, which was allegedly rocky during his heyday, dissolved after 29 years. He was caught by the National Enquirer having dinner at the Ritz-Carlton with a mistress, similar to the movie version. In real life, the Daily Mail also spotted him in Vegas with another alleged girlfriend.
Other than that, this is another theatrical release that could have been an email. Or a provocative art exhibit we all could have walked by, noticed, and forgotten. I can almost see the Super 8 found footage projected onto a wall in front of a plate of cookies, asking viewers to “come on in!” and confront society’s darkness.
Back in the last row of the theater, I found the cinematography — albeit blurry and grainy at the same time, and 90% shadows — to be the film’s only saving grace. I’m no fan of hi-def film, but two hours of squinting into the “LOFI Dusk” Instagram filter made me feel like my brain was dimming to conserve battery. I was relieved later to be blinded by the fluorescent lights in the lobby, and to see people’s faces clearly, at a normal distance — not the up-the-nose or awkwardly far-away voyeuristic shots designed to look like a ’90s camcorder. We used to need to see “REC” for “recording,” which filmmakers wove into the scenes.
Never mind the full-frontal shots and out-of-place demonic imagery, backed by a constant stream of graphic text exchanges repeated like skeevy mantras before the Hansen character’s takedowns. Whatever you’re imagining, it’s worse.
A24 took the story so far into the cornfields that Deadline reported Hansen considered legal action. Still, he didn’t want to give the film free publicity and “turn this into the movie that Chris Hansen doesn’t want you to see.”
Even if “Primetime” yanked Hansen’s identity and show concept to craft its own fiction, Hansen’s not opposed to a ratings juggernaut.
Hansen recalled on his podcast, “The show was conceived to be a story about child predators going after children online for ‘Dateline.’ I had pitched the story, and we figured out we could use this online watchdog group as decoys and we could wire a house, and we’d see what happens. Seventeen guys showed up in the first two and a half days.”
While he was still in college, Hansen got into journalism as a local reporter in Michigan. After joining NBC during the Katie Couric and Tom Brokaw era to do investigations, he landed on “Dateline.” There were questions around legal ramifications and ethics, but Hansen rocketed to stardom as the guy who catches perps. Some claimed he was only in it for the ratings (a pivotal storyline in the movie), but Hansen said, “From the beginning, we were transparent about what we did, how we did it, and the results … I pitched [the stings] because I thought it was a critical issue, and ‘Dateline’ approved it.”
The movie also takes a wild stab at the real-life story of 56-year-old assistant district attorney Louis William “Bill” Conradt Jr., who took his own life when “To Catch a Predator” crew and local law enforcement invaded his property after he didn’t meet up with a teenage decoy. Mirroring the events that led to the end of the show, Hansen’s movie character stands by producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), who declares she can totally “make this work.”
“I think it’s a bit of an insult to lower what we do in our collaborations with law enforcement and the thousands of men and women who work to protect children from predators every day in society … to the level they lowered it,” Hansen said on “The Adam Carolla Show.”
Taking his reputation into his own hands, Hansen’s currently shopping his “I Am Chris Hansen” documentary. On his pod, he described it as “a project, a film, in which I cooperated, produced by folks I knew and worked with. And it was in the works well before we ever heard of ‘Primetime.’”
“I’m so busy being the real Chris Hansen, it’s hard to fuss around with the image of the Hollywood Chris Hansen,” Hansen confirmed. Riding on the success of his original show with fresh iterations like “Takedown With Chris Hansen,” he explained, “What we hit on was something very unique. People see the commission of a crime, a felony, in real time … I don’t know of a lot of other programs that are reality-based, that take viewers to this place they wouldn’t normally get to go.”
Maybe no movie could ever do justice to the real story. But the biggest miss of “Primetime” was leaving out the guy who’s still out there cleaning up the streets.
