Predators: thoughtful documentary explores the disturbing history of true crime TV hit To Catch a Predator
David Osit’s film about the cultural phenomenon that was Chris Hasen’s ‘paedophile-hunting‘ TV series To Catch a Predator doesn’t just interrogate its ethics, it uses raw, unaired footage of the ‘predators’ from the show, and demands we see their humanity.
The last five years has seen a retrospective reckoning with the reality TV boom of the early aughts, with multiple TV series (Dark Side of Reality TV, 2024) and podcasts (Unreal: A Critical History of Reality TV, 2022) interrogating the ethics of the more extreme shows. Often they give ex-reality stars a chance to share their perspective, and show how the genre, especially in its early, under-regulated days, could publicly shame participants and ruin lives.
David Osit’s documentary Predators examines a different beast: a reality show in which public shaming and ruined lives were less symptom than objective. The film revisits the cultural impact of ‘To Catch a Predator’ (2004-07), a strand within the news magazine programme Dateline NBC made in collaboration with the paedophile watchdog group Perverted Justice. Actors were employed to pose online as minors and have men agree to sexual encounters. These ‘decoys’ – all over 18 – would invite the men to a location fitted with hidden cameras, where presenter Chris Hansen would emerge like a true-crime Jeremy Beadle to reveal the sting operation. For the payoff, he’d say they were “free to go”, then have them arrested.
Predators doesn’t just rehash the ethical issues with this vigilante entertainment. It’s an incisive, slow cinema-styled post-mortem of the series. Osit surfaces raw, unaired ‘To Catch a Predator’ footage: clips of men weeping, saying their lives are over, begging for help. It’s all the humanity that Dateline NBC had redacted, footage that crowbars empathy out of the viewer, no matter how heinous these men may be.
The film gestures at the fetid tabloid culture of cruelty in which the show thrived (an old MSNBC clip about it leads into a mocking segment on Britney Spears’ rehab) but doesn’t go much further. An upsetting interview with former decoy Dan Schrack looks at a 2006 episode that ended in suicide. The stings stopped in 2007 – it seems cancellation had more to do with advertiser unease than morality.
Early on, Osit leaves analysis to ethnographer Mark de Rond, but gradually centres himself, asking what the show can mean to survivors of abuse. He questions his own complicity: having joined an amateur sting with a YouTuber Hansen copycat, he struggles to set his camera apart from the seediness. ‘No easy answers’ moments of self-critique are common in true-crime docs, but Osit never feels phoney. Hansen says in interview that he thinks his work is “for a greater purpose”. This film’s strength is its hand-wringing uncertainty – Osit knows the end doesn’t always justify the murky means.
► Predators is in UK cinemas now.