Pan and Slam

Primetime

2026 R 1h 50m

• Director
  • Lance Oppenheim
• Writers
  • Ajon Singh
  • Luke Dittrich
• Stars
  • Robert Pattinson
  • Merritt Wever
  • Skyler Gisondo

by Jason Koenigsberg

About twenty years ago, MSNBC’s Dateline reporter Chris Hansen turned investigative reporting into shocking, almost must-see TV with his unscrupulous journalistic tactics on his show To Catch a Predator. Since then, his methods have been revealed to be quite controversial, and the new movie Primetime attempts to expose what went on behind the scenes, and it is not pretty. It opens with what seems to be an inside look at what audiences were familiar with. We see Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen lurking behind the curtain right before he is about to emerge to the shock and horror of a potential sexual predator. Voyeurism has long been an interesting theme in some of the best thrillers especially from Alfred Hitchcock with films like Rear Window (1954) and Psycho (1960). Primetime borrows more from the voyeuristic themes and styles of David Lynch films, especially Blue Velvet (1986), with its use of color while we watch people watch others onscreen.

The cinematography in Primetime has an oversaturated look, where it feels like it is an older film stock and resembles a product of the ’70s and not a movie from 2026 based on realistic news reports from cable TV in the early 21st century. This was obviously done on purpose, but it is an arbitrary artistic decision that barely serves the themes, characters, or the story and feels unnecessary. The retro music score was also distracting, playing way too often in scenes that would have benefited from silence. Sadly the filmmakers did not trust the actors to deliver their lines without any music notes to guide viewers on how they should feel for practically each moment.

The best part of Primetime is the acting. Robert Pattinson continues to have a spectacular year and follows up his role in this summer’s The Odyssey, playing another despicable character with his portrayal of Chris Hansen. Pattinson plays into the movie’s agenda to make Chris Hansen look really bad, like a bloodthirsty, ratings-hungry, egomaniacal, adulterer, narcissist. He even calls his wife at one point and says, “I’m Chris Hansen,” and shows his two young sons a videotape of his show To Catch a Predator to show off to them, extremely inappropriate to say the least. His resemblance to Chris Hansen and his mannerisms are on point. Nobody can fault his performance.

Merritt Wever plays his producer and she makes a sticks the landing in all of the scenes where she needs to make an impact. A lot of Primetime focuses on Skyler Gisondo as ‘Decoy Dan’, a young man who wants to become an actor and gets this part hoping to realize his Hollywood dreams, or at the very least get a SAG card. He becomes the moral compass of the story and the climactic scenes near the end really depend on how well the viewer connects with him. Since I found him to be the least interesting, albeit least morally bankrupt character, as his role became more important, the movie became less interesting.

Primetime could be forgiven if it was not so obvious that the screenwriters blatantly used Melville’s Moby Dick as the template for their story. Decoy Dan is Ishmael taking us on the journey into the dark and dirty world of news media, and Chris Hansen is Captain Ahab hunting for his white whale willing to do whatever it takes to beat Lost in the ratings and be more famous than his colleague/rival Stone Phillips. The fact the dialogue has Pattinson repeatedly mention that he is after a ‘what whale’ makes the screenplay for Primetime feel lazy.

The real Chris Hansen has denounced this movie as a work of fiction. One cannot blame him since Primetime portrays him as a monster and tries to expose the corruption in all news media. The latter of which is nothing unique since money and ratings are the driving forces for all TV and many better movies have been made on that subject. It is important to take Primetime with a grain of salt with its heavy handed takedown of Chris Hansen’s To Catch a Predator. Scenes where he and his producer meet with an NBC executive seem overly simplified. Unless there is a documentary with the real people Primetime is based on, or you read the book that inspired this film, it is impossible to know how much is actually true, and even then there are probably two sides to the story. This movie is all about people trying to be righteous and yet they seem to misplace their righteousness for more money, higher ratings, or a chance to get a SAG card.

Skip Primetime and check out David Lynch’s Blue Velvet which was a huge stylistic influence on this, or the hilarious South Park episode that parodies To Catch a Predator. I will leave you with this fun Hitchcock tribute video who is a Master of suspense and covers the themes of this movie with a lot more subtlety and charm.