For three years, from 2004 until 2007, the NBC Dateline program To Catch a Predator captivated American audiences with an easy, queasy morality tale of rightful comeuppance and social humiliation: undercover sting operators, including a young actor posing as an underage minor, would lure men via chatrooms and phone calls to a house under the guise of sex.
Then Chris Hansen, the equanimous and righteous host, surprised the would-be perpetrator with cameras, interviewed them and told them they were “free to go” – into surprise police custody. The whole routine tapped into the ’00s zeitgeist of thrilling exposure, gleeful shaming and morality panic — “like Punk’d for pedophiles”, as Jimmy Kimmel once put it.
Now a new documentary at the Sundance film festival is re-examining the show’s complicated legacy and our ongoing cultural fascination with true crime. Predators, directed by David Osit, first delves into the controversial production of the show, made in collaboration with the watchdog group Perverted Justice, via archival footage and interviews with three of the young decoys, who were 18 or 19 at the time of filming. Some express regret or guilt at schemes that resemble entrapment – the perpetrators were not read their rights to remain silent, told they were free to leave when they were not, and sometimes misled to believe they were headed to rehabilitation or therapy. “Years later, I’m still emotionally exhausted,” former decoy Casey Mauro says of the show.
Predators includes numerous excerpts of explicit chats and phone calls between the decoys and the men, who openly fantasized about sexual relations with someone they believed to be underage, as young as 13. To Catch a Predator relied on “fantasy co-created with the show, where kids are hyper-sexual and available” to lure its targets, says Mark de Rond, an ethnographer who has researched To Catch a Predator-esque efforts in the UK. But “if you show these men as human beings” – consider their lives, or rehabilitation, or a different method from justice – “the show kinda breaks down.”
Where To Catch a Predator maintained a strict, comforting black-and-white vision – the targets bad and the show good, all consequences justified by the men’s actions – Predators dives headlong into a moral grey area, beginning with the show’s ties to law enforcement, blurring the line between justice and entertainment. As a reality show, To Catch a Predator had “elements of a traveling circus”, says Byron Harris, a reporter in Dallas who first investigated how show producers manipulated interrogations or instructed police in Texas. “Who’s employed by whom?”
Texas was the site of the show’s downfall, on least on broadcast television. On 5 November 2006, Hansen and show producers attempted to lure a target to a home in Murphy, Texas, via a decoy posing as a 13-year-old boy. The man never arrived, but was later learned to be an assistant district attorney in a neighboring county. The cameras were rolling when producers and law enforcement arrived at Bill Conradt’s house unannounced, and he killed himself. Predators includes raw footage from the day, showing officers smiling and Hansen unconcerned at reports of the man’s death. Dateline ended up airing some of the footage, billed as a surprise confrontation with deadly consequences. His family sued the program, which was cancelled in early 2008.
But the show has maintained a loyal following in the nearly two decades since it last aired. Predators’s middle chapter examines the leagues of copycat programs, often vigilante outfits with dubious ties to law enforcement and millions of followers on YouTube. The idea for the film itself arose from Osit’s interest in the show’s vociferous online fan communities, who obtained raw footage and documents of the show through Freedom of Information (Foia) requests and were continuing to dissect the cases online. Reading the chats, but learning more about the show’s production, “I kept having this emotional ping-pong, for me,” he said during a Q&A after the film’s Park City premiere, and tried to “transmit that experience to an audience, as well”.
Osit had been a fan of the show during its original runtime, for reasons that he discusses during the film. Predators goes to increasingly surprising, personal and galling places that are best not to spoil, as Osit seeks comprehension and tests the limits of empathy, referring to Hansen’s oft-said line “help me understand” – though “the show never really did that for me”, he says in one scene. As De Rond notes, “understanding is not the goal on the show”.
Some involved with the original program and its copycats express regret over their participation; others maintain that they were and are doing good work, making the world a better place. Still others would like to see Hansen, still working in the increasingly squeamish law enforcement entertainment space with the media company TruBlu, pay for his role. The film doesn’t resolve with easy answers, because there aren’t any. But as Osit notes in one emotional scene, the process has “taught me a lot of empathy” – something the show, for all its grandstanding, “tried to crush”.
Predators is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
