Primetime and What's Making Us Happy
Pop Culture Happy Hour
The episode features a critical discussion of the new docudrama 'Primetime,' which fictionalizes the rise of the NBC series 'To Catch a Pred
Key takeaways
- The film 'Primetime' stars Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen and is described by hosts as a 'fever dream' that lacks emotional depth.
- Hosts suggest the documentary 'Predators' provides a more substantial exploration of entrapment and the ethics of vigilante justice than the new docudrama.
Main topics
- Primetime film review
- To Catch a Predator legacy
Notable quotes
This is a scuzzy movie.
Conclusion
While the main critique highlights a lack of substance in modern drama
Transcript preview
Speaker 5 (0:00) This is Ira Glass. On This American Life, we tell stories about when things change. Like for this guy, David, whose entire life took a sharp, unexpected, and very unpleasant turn. And it did take me a while to realize it's basically because the monkey pressed the button. That's right. Because the monkey pressed the button. Spicing stories every week, wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 6 (0:23) The first choice it makes is to yeet us straight into the slime. And y'all said, see me, Gene? The first word in my notes is scuzzy. This is a scuzzy movie. Speaker 4 (0:33) Scuzzy, yeah, yeah. Speaker 6 (0:39) The new docudrama Primetime is a weird and highly fictionalized account of the rise of the NBC series To Catch Predator, which became a cultural phenomenon back in the mid-aughts. It stars Robert Pattinson as the show's square-jawed host, Chris Henson, who's feeling pressure to get bigger ratings as he and his team work with local law enforcement to drag the potential sexual abusers of minors before the camera and arrest them. I'm Glenn Weldon, and joining me today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour is my fellow host, Aisha Harris. Hey, Aisha. Hi, Glenn. Also with us is one of the hosts of NPR's Code Switch podcast, Gene Demby. Hey, Gene, welcome in. How's it going, Wes? Great to have you. All right, so in the film primetime, we enter the world of To Catch a Predator just as it's becoming a huge hit for NBC. We enter it through the eyes of Dan, a wannabe actor played by Skylar Gisando. He's hired to act as a decoy, pretending to be a 13-year-old boy who lures men to suburban homes where the Two Catcher Predator team ambushes them and cops arrest them. Dan has qualms about the job until he meets with the charismatic host Chris Hansen, played by Robert Pattinson. Hansen convinces the impressionable Dan to stay, even as the host is distracted by a troubled home life amid the show's meteoric rise. The show is so successful, in fact, that another network is looking to poach Hansen's very stressed-out producer, Andy. She is played by the great Merritt Weaver. Primetime is the first scripted feature directed by documentarian Lance Oppenheim. It was made without the cooperation of Chris Hansen. He's spoken out against it and continues to stand by his work on To Catch a Predator. Also, he hasn't seen it. He says the non-disclosure agreement he was asked to sign by the film studio A24 was restrictive. Primetime is in theaters now. Gene, kick us off. What did you make of this weirder-than-I-thought-it-would-be movie? Speaker 7 (2:29) Weirder than I thought it would be is exactly how I felt about it, too. It's really claustrophobic, right? Like, the way it opens is literally you hear Chris Hansen repeating, muttering to himself, I will entrust you and you will entrust me. And, you know, the conceit there is that Chris Hansen is creepily watching the creepy people. Who is the voyeur? Who is the creepy person? Like, oh, who is the gross person? There's so many, like, tight shots, and the people and the stuff we're talking about is so gross that just, like, even the sound of him narrating the text conversations is, like, it's really, knowing that these people who are thought to be predators and children, it's like, the movie, like, really leans into, like, the seaminess of this enterprise. And so you're watching, and you just feel, like, kind of, like, a visceral disgust. And I don't think I actually ever got over that feeling, because the whole time I was like, ooh, I... don't want to look at this, right? Speaker 6 (3:21) For better or for worse. I'm curious what Speaker 7 (3:23) you guys thought about it. Speaker 4 (3:24) All Speaker 6 (3:24) right, Aisha. See me. That's one word. Give me another. Give me a few more. Speaker 4 (3:29) See me is a great word. I Speaker 6 (3:31) would Speaker 4 (3:31) also say kind of like funhouse, mirror, nightmare, fever dream is like where other Speaker 5 (3:37) things Speaker 4 (3:38) that came up for me. These Speaker 5 (3:39) are Speaker 4 (3:39) all good words. I was really into what this movie was doing for the first like 30, 40 minutes or so. I think that... It's making very deliberate choices. One of the things that stood out to me was the score by Ari Balouzian, which to my mind kind of called to mind Bernard Herrmann's scores for Taxi Driver and Psycho. Speaker 5 (4:00) And so I Speaker 4 (4:01) was like really into that sort of like menacing, hazy, like very unsettling feel that this is going for. And I think Robert Pattinson is just really, really good in this role. Speaker 5 (4:13) I'm Chris Hansen with Dateline NBC. And we're doing a story on adults who try to meet teens online. Please don't put this on TV, please. Speaker 4 (4:23) I've seen him in three movies this year where he's playing some form of, like, dirtbag. And each one feels very, very different. And this one felt very different from what I saw in the Odyssey and what I saw in the drama. So I was feeling it. But overall, this feels very undercooked to me. Like, the vibe kind of works when it's, like, circling that. Tim Robinson wagon, that kind of thing. Speaker 7 (4:47) That was not a name I thought you would invoke. I mean, Speaker 4 (4:51) but you can kind of see it, right? Like, you can kind of see that. But then it's not really in service of anything insightful or particularly impactful, emotionally speaking. Maybe we'll get into this, but like, I couldn't help but think about the great documentary that came out last year, Predators by David Ossett, which is... focusing on this exact topic but is able to get into so many more things and is really kind of like questioning this idea of vigilante justice and like you know whether the benefits of that really outweighed the cost for everyone involved and i think this movie gestures towards that but does not actually try to explore that in the way that predators the documentary does so I quote unquote enjoyed it or like I wasn't bored, but I don't think this is deep as I or like thoughtful as I wanted it to be for all of the like theatrics that are involved with it. Speaker 6 (5:46) Oh, that's Speaker 4 (5:47) a Speaker 6 (5:47) good point. I had a rolling reaction to this in the moment. I thought this is a ride and Robert Pattinson is always fun to watch. He's always going to make the big bold choice. The more I sat with it after seeing it, the more it kind of curdled on me. I don't question that what it's doing is exactly what it sets out to do. It wants to tackle something this lurid and dark and emotional and complicated in a way that's really lurid and dark and emotional, but without any complications at all. It is really stripping away any nuance. And look, you go into it and you know that the first choice it makes is to yeet us straight into the slime. And y'all said, see me, Gene? The first word in my notes is scuzzy. This is a scuzzy movie. Scuzzy, Speaker 4 (6:31) yeah, yeah. Like, for example, Speaker 6 (6:34) hiring Jeff Zucker, the former head of NBC, to play himself and have him just be there going, well, I don't like your show, but America sure seems to. That is scuzzy. I was like, is that someone who looks just like Jeff Zucker? That's wild. approach here is to go fully subjective because objectivity is a myth, whatever. And so it's all character based. It's all emotional based, highly stylized, which apparently is a Lance Oppenheim thing.