Some thoughts on Primetime

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the ethics of true crime, including To Catch a Predator, the electric Dateline series from the mid-aughts about journalist Chris Hansen confronting men who arrived at a house expecting to meet minors for sex. I described myself as a fan of the show, despite some reservations about the show’s methods. At the time, I was looking forward to seeing Primetime, Lance Oppenheim’s fictionalized account of the show’s disastrous Murphy, Texas investigation, which ended in the suicide of assistant district attorney Bill Conradt as police and television cameras arrived at his home. TCaP was ultimately canned by the network in the wake of these events.

I saw the film on opening night (September 25), albeit the French-dubbed version. What follows are some thoughts based on the notes I took after watching.

Robert Pattinson’s Chris Hansen is a heightened creation. I can’t speak to his vocal performance, but his physical performance is formidable. Much of the film is shot like a horror movie, with Hansen as the villain. The character reminded me at times of Jake Gyllenhaal as Louis Bloom in Nightcrawler.

Hansen is often shot in the same oversaturated, hyperreal colours that you see on the CRT monitors displaying footage from the stings. The man making the television show takes on the appearance of the images he is creating, the monster of the screens. Dan, the young decoy and protégé of Hansen, sometimes receives the same chromatic treatment.

What struck me the most about Primetime was how it was fundamentally a film about respect. Hansen craves the respect of his journalistic colleagues and his family. In one scene, he wakes up his sons to show them footage of his show and to brag about snagging a primetime slot. His producer, Andie, wants Hansen’s professional respect, and flirts with another network when she doesn’t feel she’s getting it. Decoy Dan also wants Hansen’s approval, as well as to be taken seriously as an actor. This leads to one of the film’s more surreal scenes, where the decoy steps into the role of Chris Hansen in one of the confrontations with a predator (a marked departure from anything that happened in the actual show).

The men caught in the sting operations, of course, are afforded no respect at all. The central premise of TCaP is that the men walking into the trap house have forfeited any claim to dignity and can be subjected to almost any degree of humiliation. Hansen is the arbiter of respect, even as he struggles to achieve it himself.

The film is intensely negative in its portrayal of Hansen, the show, and the Murphy police department. Hansen is shown as an insecure obsessive on a crusade against an ancient evil that traces back to an assignment in the jungles of India. The show is portrayed as chasing shock, drama, and ratings. A cameo by real-life former NBC boss Jeff Zucker playing himself gives an odd sense of credibility to this thematic element, although Zucker has acknowledged that the meeting depicted in the film never happened. The Murphy policemen holding guns are every bit as eager to create a spectacle as the crew members holding the cameras.

There are a lot of recognizable lines and moments for aficionados of the TCaP investigations, but fans will also recognize the many fictional elements and departures from the real timeline. The imminent revelation of Hansen’s affair, a driving force behind Hansen’s increasingly desperate actions throughout the story, didn’t happen in reality until a few years after the show was cancelled. The confrontation with the rabbi David Kaye, the closest the original production got to a violent confrontation, was one of the most tense and haunting scenes in the film. But the film depicts it among TCaP’s final investigations, whereas this confrontation came from the show’s second investigation, in Fairfax, Virginia, before law enforcement was even directly involved with the stings.

The film is very effective at building a psychological portrait of the Chris Hansen character. The affair makes him a hypocrite, the scene where he wakes up his kids makes him pathetic, his conversations with Decoy Dan make him manipulative. His staring-into-the-void-until-it-stares-back obsession with cleansing evil eventually turns him into a monster himself. But did Hansen really see himself as hunting monsters, or was that simply the most compelling motivation the filmmakers could invent for him? Certainly the child serial killer investigation in India never happened, though Hansen did report on child labour in the country a few years before TCaP.

The film is at its most convincing in showing how the incentives of reality television distort serious investigations and the pursuit of justice. Early on, it establishes one of the core rules of the show (“they come to us”), then shows us how the procedural boundaries of the sting are gradually eroded, first by decoys pushing the conversations toward sex, and finally by an army of cops and television cameras rolling up on the house of Bill Conradt. I loved the ending of this final confrontation, leaving us with a much darker perspective on one of the show’s iconic catchphrases.

“What would have happened if I wasn’t here?”

I enjoyed Primetime enormously as a film. It is disturbing, visually captivating, and succeeds in making a very familiar moment in television history feel alien. I just don’t know how much I learned about Chris Hansen.