A man from Long Beach, California, is here to have sex with someone he believes is a 13-year-old girl. When the journalist Chris Hansen walks in, the man’s stomach drops. He is caught, and it is the end of his life as he knew it.
Hansen asks what his fate should be. It explores how a network news show turned sting operations into must-see television, raising a host of ethical questions about justice, voyeurism and society’s willingness to dehumanise certain offenders for profit and entertainment. The swaggering Hansen is played by Robert Pattinson, whose recent movies include The Batman, The Drama and The Odyssey.
He delivers a line that captures the film’s argument about a societal turning point: “There used to be a pillory in every village. Now, there’s a television in every living room.” But the real Hansen, 67, has branded the movie an “insult” and “identity theft” without having seen it. Going head-to-head with ABC’s Lost in primetime, Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator was one of the defining TV hits of the US ratings wars of the mid-2000s, an era before streaming.
The programme targeted men suspected of soliciting sex with minors in online chat rooms. Volunteers from the citizen watchdog group Perverted Justice posed as underage children, engaging adults in conversations and then arranging meetings at fake homes. There, decoy actors playing the supposed teenagers would be waiting.
The men would be confronted on camera by Hansen while police officers stood outside, ready to make arrests. The formula proved hugely successful. By the 2006-07 season, To Catch a Predator was averaging about 7 million viewers an episode, turning Hansen into a star with his own catchphrase: “Have a seat.” David Osit, director of Predators, an acclaimed 2025 documentary about the show, says: “The show was sordid and creepy and amusing and you could find many different ways to relate to what was happening.
You could identify with the parents, you could identify with Chris Hansen, you could identify with the schadenfreude of watching these men have the worst day of their lives. It’s quite clear that this still has an effect on people because it is at this nexus of discomfort and basic human instinct. In our deepest hearts we are voyeurs and we enjoy discomfort from a safe vantage point and that’s what the show was able to offer people.” But in 2006 the operation took a fatal turn.
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