A24 has released the first trailer for Primetime, with Robert Pattinson playing television host Chris Hansen during a defining period for To Catch a Predator. Director Lance Oppenheim makes his narrative feature debut with the film, which arrives in US theaters on September 25.
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The drama thriller follows Hansen in 2006, during the height of To Catch a Predator. The official logline reads: “In 2006, ‘To Catch a Predator’ host Chris Hansen sets out to make television history.”
To Catch a Predator ran from 2004 to 2007 as a recurring investigative report and primetime segment on Dateline NBC. Hansen and a camera crew followed undercover operations around the United States that sought to identify adults who communicated online with people they believed to be minors.
The trailer presents Pattinson’s Hansen as a television figure driven by the scale and potential impact of the program. It also examines the authority Hansen assumed through a format that combined investigative reporting, confrontation and entertainment television. Oppenheim brings the distinctive visual approach associated with his documentary work, which includes Ren Faire and Some Kind of Heaven.
The film draws from Luke Dittrich’s 2007 Esquire article “Tonight On Dateline This Man Will Die,” with Ajon Singh adapting the story for the screen. Ari Aster joins Pattinson, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Fred Berger, Brighton McCloskey and Lars Knudsen as producers, with Range Media, Icki Eneo Arlo and Square Peg behind the production. Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo and Phoebe Bridgers round out the cast alongside Pattinson.
The story arrives with the complicated history of To Catch a Predator already attached to its subject. In November 2006, Rockwall County assistant district attorney Bill Conradt died during an operation involving Texas police and the television team. The incident generated significant controversy around the program and the methods behind its televised investigations.
The series later faced further scrutiny through an investigation by ABC’s 20/20 and a lawsuit filed by Conradt’s sister. NBC canceled To Catch a Predator in 2008. During its run, the program attracted a large audience and became closely associated with Hansen, whose confrontations with subjects turned him into one of the most recognizable figures connected to investigative television of that period.
Primetime approaches that material through a dramatized portrait of Hansen at the height of the program’s cultural reach. The trailer suggests that Oppenheim will focus closely on the relationship between Hansen’s stated mission, his growing television profile and the mechanics of turning investigations into primetime programming.
