‘Primetime’ Is a Morally Murky Mess

Late in Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) says to another character, “Your definition of bad and my definition of bad are vastly different.”

The line perfectly sums up the moral confusion that is both the message and medium of this movie—a twisted take on Hansen’s popular NBC show, To Catch a Predator (2004–7).

Primetime is a gross movie, both in what it depicts and in how it depicts it. Even though Oppenheim’s goal seems to be mirroring to us our moral inconsistencies—as well as our “can’t look away” voyeurism—the film also perpetuates these problems. Maybe the director is aware of that, maybe not. Either way, Primetime offers a sensationalistic, exploitative cinematic experience that’s morally hollow and far less interesting than it thinks it is.

Why Does Gen Z Love ‘Primetime’?

In case it’s not already clear, I do not recommend anyone watch this movie. But the fact that people are watching it, especially large numbers of young people, means Christian leaders and parents should at least be aware of the film and the broader moral confusion it represents.

Primetime (rated R) had a big opening weekend at the box office—the third-highest-grossing film in studio A24’s history. Following the pattern of this year’s other breakout hit for A24, Backrooms, the success of Primetime is largely fueled by Gen Z (69 percent of opening-weekend audiences were under 30). This is especially interesting given these young viewers weren’t even alive when To Catch a Predator aired. What’s the appeal for young viewers?

Part of it is A24’s strong reputation for cool aesthetics and metamodern storytelling—a mood-heavy blend of reflexive self-awareness and earnest social consciousness. But metamodernism is often ideologically incoherent, and Primetime is case in point.

Ask a group of Gen Zers who just watched Primetime what the moral takeaway is, and you’re likely to get a wild array of answers. It might feel to them like an Important Film. But why exactly it’s “important” is harder to articulate. For many young audiences today, a distinct vibe is more valuable than a cogent argument.

Meta Media Criticism

Loosely based on a 2009 Esquire article about the incident that led to the cancellation of To Catch a Predator, Primetime is a movie about media’s dark side. A Gen-Z digital native, 30-year-old Oppenheim is abundantly aware of the malformative dynamics of an overmediated world. But, like many of his peers, he’s less sure of solutions. And Oppenheim’s choice to render Primetime in a horror-movie aesthetic backfires; it becomes so garish that it trivializes whatever serious ideas he might be mulling.

Most of the film’s media critique riffs on well-worn concerns over gawker voyeurism (“If it bleeds, it leads”). Neil Postman was talking about this in the ’80s and ’90s. Movies like Nightcrawler (2014) or Christine (2016) made the same points.

Primetime also notes the way modern media blurs lines between entertainment and real life (“infotainment”). Oppenheim even has former NBC executive Jeff Zucker play himself in an amusing cameo, in which he suggests moving How to Catch a Predator to a prime-time slot to go head-to-head with ABC’s hit drama, Lost. Hansen later comments that he wants his show to be “bigger than Lost,” maybe even worthy of an Emmy.

Yet even as Hansen catches bad guys in the film, he’s portrayed as a bad guy, complete with a crazy-eyed, red-filtered face that might haunt your nightmares. Primetime situates Hansen within a media industrial complex that is itself predatory in the way it profits from feeding our unhealthy lusts.

That’s a true enough point, of course. Hollywood is fundamentally exploitative. And if Oppenheim had managed to make this point without perpetuating it in practice, it’d be well taken. But in fact, Primetime is a predatory piece of exploitative entertainment. As it depicts lurid situations—explicit online chats between pedophiles and their victims, disturbing in-person encounters between the adult men and the underage prey they desire—the film indulges in the very voyeurism it critiques.

As it depicts lurid situations, Primetime indulges in the very voyeurism it critiques.

The moment this becomes clear is a jarring scene where former child actor Jonathan Lipnicki (the adorable kid from Jerry Maguire, now 35) shows up, playing one of the pedophiles lured by To Catch a Predator’s “Decoy Dan” (another former child actor, Skyler Gisondo). In the scene, the pedophile character (Lipnicki) drops his pants and exposes himself to Dan (Gisondo)—and us. It’s a dehumanizing, unnecessary, and gross affront to the actor’s dignity, made even more upsetting by the fact that we remember both these actors (Lipnicki and Gisondo) primarily from their childhood roles. At least two other pedophile characters in the film are played by former child actors (Tony Revolori and Alex Winter).

Whatever clever or “important” point Oppenheim thinks he’s making by casting former child actors as adult predators is undermined by the grotesqueness of it all.

Of Monsters and Men

Just as the precise nature of Oppenheim’s media criticism in Primetime is elusive, so too are his moral points.

In true metamodern fashion, a clear moral energy is at work in this movie—a palpable awareness that evil is real and injustice is wrong. But the film has no rubric for naming or evaluating degrees of evil, nor any hope that justice can be rightly served. Oppenheim seems to mostly relish deconstructing bourgeois society’s too-clean approaches to justice, problematizing what he sees as too-tidy categories of good and evil.

The people who watched To Catch a Predator and felt better about the world, it seems Oppenheim is saying, are just like the people who made Sound of Freedom a breakout hit in 2023, or who applauded the “War on Terror” rhetoric that led to Saddam Hussein’s execution in 2006 (a news event explicitly referenced in Primetime). The film suggests these people need the catharsis of obviously evil villains (pedophiles, dictators, terrorists) to feel better about their own moral improprieties and the world’s uncertainties.

Hansen becomes a more villainous character than the pedophiles in Primetime because, Oppenheim suggests, Hansen epitomizes a sort of George W. Bush–style moral simplicity. “You’re either with me or you’re with him,” Hansen says in the film. “We are cleansing the world of an ancient evil.” It’s an approach that justifies ethically dubious means toward a supposedly “righteous” end (one cop tells Hansen, “You’re doing the Lord’s work!”). For Oppenheim, Hansen is a poster boy for Nietzsche’s famous warning: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”

It’s all so familiar and tired. Almost every movie about a classic villain these days makes the same “rethinking monsters” move: from Frankenstein to Wicked to Joker to Cruella and umpteen others. It appears the Netflix adaptation of East of Eden is doing the same thing with Cathy Ames, whom Steinbeck famously describes as a “psychic monster” with a “malformed soul.” In the disordered moral imagination of post-Christian culture, monsters are misunderstood and traumatized—products of circumstance, not of their own agency.

It’s all so familiar and tired. Almost every movie about a classic villain these days makes the same ‘rethinking monsters’ move.

Primetime stops short of absolving the pedophilic predators, though in many scenes Oppenheim clearly aims to make us feel sorry for them and conflicted about the humiliation they endure. He also goes out of his way to equivocate the villainy of the pedophiles with the sins of Hansen (who’s caught in an extramarital affair at the same time as he hosts To Catch a Predator).

But does the fact that we’re all sinners mean all sins are equally bad? If a person like Hansen is morally flawed or hypocritical, does it render all his moral intuitions wrong or pursuits of justice invalid? Obviously not. That Primetime wants to confuse us about these questions says a lot about today’s world.

Rebuilding Society’s Moral Architecture

When a movie implicitly asks us to ease up on our indignation toward pedophiles, or when a society empathizes with a mother who strangled her three children to death, you know something has gone terribly askew in our moral architecture.

It shouldn’t be hard for us to collectively recognize that the sexual exploitation of children is more evil than an adult’s extramarital affair (even though both are condemnable sins). It shouldn’t be hard to see that murdering innocent children is a greater degree of evil than murdering adults (though both are evil).

Yet here we are. The moral mess that is Primetime, and its popularity among Gen Z, should be a galvanizing reminder for Christians. Today’s world is deeply moral and profoundly hungry for justice. But the path to justice is unclear and the principles of morality confused—unavoidably so, short of consensus on absolute truth.

Today’s metamodern mix of moral fervor and moral confusion presents problems. But for the church, it’s also an opportunity. As Christians, we can point to a God who perfectly administers justice and holds all sinners accountable—every single one of us (Rom. 14:12). But we can also celebrate that this same just God is rich is mercy and saves by grace (Eph. 2:4–5).

In a world where human-arbitrated justice often devolves into horror, this is the hope we need.