Primetime director Lance Oppenheim wanted to capture the absurdity of Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator in the new true crime-inspired drama.
“I like the idea of sort of riffing on the reality of the show and the original show to me felt like a mixture of horror and real-life horror and comedy, absurdity in a way,” Oppenheim tells GamesRadar+. “The way that Chris Hansen would find these guys who were trying to do something absolutely horrific, and he would sort of put them in the position of this bizarro experiment he had created where he had actors, adult actors pretending to be children.”
In the series To Catch a Predator, which aired on NBC from 2004 to 2008, journalist Chris Hansen worked with an advocacy group named Perverted Justice whose members pretended to be minors in order to target men who solicit sex in online chatrooms. Rather than tell the story of Hansen’s life or how the show came to be, the movie fictionalizes the Esquire article, “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,” which details the hyper-controversial sting operation that resulted in the suicide of a Texas DA.
Each episode of the show saw a real-life predatory male meet up with a decoy at a fake home, only to be captured by police after being interrogated by Hansen. In Primetime, we get a look at Hansen’s obsession with both justice and TV ratings… and see the way he psyches himself up before going out to confront each criminal on camera. The material is so dark that the overall comedic nature makes perfect sense in terms of tone and narrative structure… though it devolves into a kind of quiet devastation as the movie goes on.
Continues Oppenheim: “Cookies and pepperoni pizzas and sweet tea and these houses that looked very normal, but somehow when you put a camera in them and shoot them in the way they did… it looks like all the images were beamed in from outer space, from Mars. So I wanted to get that sense down. I really wanted to get that feeling where everything felt a little off, and I wanted it to feel like a fever dream that kind of turned into like a nightmare, I guess.”
Primetime is out in theaters on September 25, 2026. For more, check out our list of all the exciting upcoming movies in 2026 and beyond.