'Predators' director David Osit discusses his new documentary about To Catch A Predator and Chris Hansen
The instant I heard someone was making a documentary about To Catch A Predator I knew I had to see it. While it may seem like something of a weird novelty now, it’s hard to overstate what a phenomenon To Catch A Predator was in its own time. The clips of personalities like Jimmy Kimmel and Jon Stewart praising To Catch A Predator star Chris Hansen for the “important work” he was doing attest to that. Those are just some of the reminders for us in David Osit’s new documentary Predators how instantly successful the Dateline segment was. In other clip from the early aughts, Hansen testifies before congress.
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Did T-Cap (as it comes to be known in Predators) always give me the ick or did the inherent grossness of the concept only become clear in 2007, when an assistant DA in Texas killed himself with Dateline camera crews swarming outside his house, just after a SWAT team had breached the door?
That guy, the “perp,” had shared lewd chats with a decoy posing as a 16-year-old boy. It escalated to a phone conversation. The decoy had pushed for a meetup. The DA had first stood up the decoy, then broken off contact. The camera crew, along with some participating police, had figured out who he was and went to his house instead, where he shot himself.
The show got sued for $105 million and only ran for six more episodes. But Chris Hansen’s shtick remains as a meme, and has gone onto spawn an entire genre of copycats on YouTube and social media. Hansen, his copycats, and Osit’s own journey as an abuse survivor and one-time T-Cap obsessive are the three central storylines in Predators, which breaks down so much of what I find unsettling about both the format and Hansen personally.
I got to speak with Osit this past week and wrote about it for GQ.
It’s comforting to imagine every that perp nabbed (or driven to suicide) was a genuine child predator (and some undoubtedly were), but others seem now like the same type of people susceptible to being driven crazy by AI chatbots.
Does it matter whether the people netted and publicly smeared in these kinds of stings are genuine pedophiles, or just guys (basically always guys) living at the same intersection of loneliness and untreated mental illness that seems to cause AI psychosis? Does it matter that the people they chat with, reveal perverse fantasies to, and sometimes try (or are baited into) meeting up with aren’t actually underage, but adults, participating, in some way, in this fantasy scenario? Does it matter that the thing they’re selling, the fantasy of a sexually available teenager trolling chat rooms for an older sexual partner, may not actually exist outside of this dual fantasy?
If that sounds dark, it is, though Predators is also darkly comic, especially in its segment about copycats.
In its second segment, Predators follows a Hansen copycat YouTuber who goes by “Skeet Hansen” and refers to the Dateline segment colloquially as “T-Cap.” Skeet Hansen performs a passable, if tawdrier imitation of T-Cap, using a heavily-tattooed, 37-year-old decoy named “T Coy” to capture an alleged pervert before delivering what seems to be his signature catchphrase, “you’ve just been Skeeted.” A plaque commemorating 100,000 YouTube subscribers hangs on his wall.
Anyway, I don’t want to spoil the entire, thoughtful (I hope) write up I did over at GQ, which you can read over there, along with a condensed version of the interview. You can hear the full audio of my chat with David Osit above.
As for the A24 To Catch A Predator movie we reference, it’s called Primetime.
The project, which has a script by Ajon Singh, is said to center on a journalist who takes on the underbelly of crime in a unique way and changes television forever. At this stage, Pattinson does not have a deal to star, only produce.
Sources say that the film draws inspiration from To Catch a Predator, the popular and zeitgeist-buzzing 2000s reality TV show in which host Chris Hansen partook in sting operations luring adult men to homes under the pretense of sexual encounters with minors. A24 is not confirming any connection to the show. [Hollywood Reporter]
That article was from 2024, though some alleged photos from the set dropped in March. They don’t come from any sources I would recognize as legit, though the timing certainly lines up with when Primetime would’ve been shooting. And if they’re real, it definitely appears that Pattinson is playing someone who looks like Hansen.
In an additional wrinkle, the director of Primetime is none other than Lance Oppenheim, a multiple-time #Content Report and Frotcast guest, who previously directed the brilliant documentaries Some Kind of Heaven, Spermworld, and Ren Faire. There’s a good chance we’ll be able to get him back when Primetime comes out. Serendipity, baby.
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