For Lance Oppenheim, Primetime’s DNA resides inside a silly Cameo video. The director, who’d grown up fascinated with To Catch a Predator’s Chris Hansen, was celebrating the release of his FX documentary, 2024’s Spermworld, when his wife bought him a recorded message from the former Dateline NBC host himself as a surprise gift. In it, Hansen congratulated Oppenheim on Spermworld, told him to “have a seat” — riffing on one of his beloved catchphrases from the series — and then, unusually, started pitching him on new projects he was working on.
“I thought to myself, ‘Oh, he’s not just the crusading journalist, he’s also an entertainer, and he’s also self-aware of this media persona that he’s cultivated for a very long time,’” Oppenheim says. “That Cameo video almost crystallized the whole thing for me. In a weird way, this film is almost an adaptation of the Cameo video. He had been absorbed into this strange, performative version of himself.”
Watch Primetime, which stars Robert Pattinson as Hansen, and that vision is clear. The film, loosely adapted by first-time screenwriter Ajon Singh from an Esquire article by Luke Dittrich, dramatizes the darkest year in Hansen’s time on To Catch a Predator, which ran from 2004-07 and saw the host trapping would-be pedophiles in hidden-camera setups before often coordinating their arrest with law enforcement. The show was a phenomenon that continues to inspire copycats and parodies; Hansen emerged as an icon for some, and a meme for others.
