The Dark Side of Predator Catchers and the New A24 Movie 'Primetime'

Child predators are arguably the most reviled demographic in society.

So when someone like Chris Hansen, the former NBC Dateline journalist and host of the To Catch a Predator series, decides to take up the mantle of exposing them to the public, he is naturally praised as a hero.

But, as is revealed in Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime—a dramatized snapshot of Hansen’s life at the show’s peak—it’s not as simple as that. Exposing allegedly bad people for public entertainment brings up a lot of ethical concerns and unintended consequences. And while many of the vigilantes carrying out these sting operations claim they are doing a public service, their motivations become a lot more suspect when fame and money are involved.

To Catch a Predator launched in 2004. In the show, Hansen’s team would pair up with civilian watchdog group Perverted Justice, using adult “decoys” to pose as minors online and exchange messages with men in chatrooms and private DMs. After the conversations became sexual, the crew would set up a sting, inviting these men to a home to meet the decoy, only to have Hansen confront them, uttering his catchphrase, “Have a seat.” The men were technically free to leave instead of sitting for an on-camera interview, but often police were waiting outside to arrest them.

The show developed an intense fandom that remains active to this day in subreddits like r/tcap, which has 52,000 weekly visitors, despite the fact that NBC stopped airing the original series in 2007.

In A24's Primetime, a darkly told character study in theaters September 25, Hansen (Robert Pattinson) clearly enjoys the praise and seems desperate for more accolades. He brags to his two young sons that he’s about to be on prime-time television, despite them not understanding the importance of that, and complains that the show has “never won an Emmy or any of the significance it deserves.” When a fan recognizes Hansen on a flight and becomes bloodthirsty, asking the TV host if he ever wants to “bleed” the predators he’s outing, Hansen smiles and admits that what he does by disgracing them on national television is “a little worse.”

In real life, Hansen cofounded the streaming service Trublu in November 2022, where he continues his investigations into alleged child predators. But these days, he’s far from alone. His work has inspired copycats, who thrive on social media and streaming platforms like YouTube, Kick, and Facebook. These groups and individuals are largely disorganized, and as such, hard to track, but a 2022 Washington Post investigation identified at least 160 in the US. Arguably, the people running these operations are more reckless, in part because they’re driven by virality.

One of them, who goes by Skeet Hansen, was featured in the 2025 MTV documentary Predators, about the Dateline show. In the film, directed by David Osit, Skeet Hansen responds to the criticism of the movement by saying, “There’s never been a detective that solved a murder that didn't get paid for it. So why shouldn't I be able to monetize off of catching these guys like the original show and making this content for people’s entertainment?”

One of many issues with that argument is that these hunters aren’t professional investigators—and sometimes they get things wrong.

In April, YouTuber and Kick streamer Vitaly Zdorovetskiy apologized after publicly—and wrongly— accosting a man of Indian descent. He accused the man of wanting to “rape a 16-year-old” in a mock Indian accent and called him “Mr. Mumbai.” In March 2025, The New York Times reported that Zdorovetskiy’s tactics for ambushing suspected creeps included beating some of them up, dressing like the Joker; the Times piece found that there have been more than 170 violent vigilante attacks by predator-hunting groups since 2023.

I spent over a year investigating similar groups in Canada for Vice, starting in 2015, and found that some of the people being targeted in stings had severe intellectual and physical disabilities.

Law enforcement groups, meanwhile, have repeatedly denounced vigilantes, noting that their evidence often can’t be used within the criminal justice system and that confronting alleged pedophiles can allow the targeted person to escape before police can step in. In some cases, the so-called predator hunters have ended up being charged with child-porn offenses themselves.

Warning: The following contains spoilers for Primetime.

In Primetime, the catastrophic consequences of these rogue busts culminate in a sting taking down Louis William “Bill” Conradt Jr., a chief felony assistant district attorney in Rockwall County, Texas. Conradt doesn’t agree to come to a decoy house, so both the TV crew and police show up at his home, where he shoots and kills himself. (The real-life Hansen told the Hollywood Reporter he doesn’t regret the November 2006 sting. Neither he nor NBC responded to a request for comment for this story.)

There are no heroes in Primetime, and the movie doesn’t wrap up any of these threads neatly.

At the end, struggling actor “Decoy Dan,” played excellently by Skyler Gisondo, finally gets career validation when his appearances on the show earn him a SAG-AFTRA card, but it’s clear from his expression that he’s not comfortable with what he had to do to get it.

Meanwhile, Hansen’s character, who repeats the phrase “What would have happened if I wasn’t here?” to suspected predators throughout the film, leaves the audience to grapple with that question. The answers are far from black-and-white.