Why Did We Ever Watch To Catch a Predator?

The year 2004, situated after 9/11 and before the election of Barack Obama, might have been the one that best summed up the excesses and cruelties of the George W. Bush era, particularly on television: The Apprentice, Nipplegate, 60 Minutes’ report on atrocities at Abu Ghraib, The Swan. The overarching theme was exposure, followed by ensuing cycles of shame, recrimination, and (often) profit. Reality TV, having cycled through its anthropological social-experiment phase, was now balls-to-the-wall invested in spectacle—the more lurid and indefensible, the better. In March 2004, MTV debuted I Want a Famous Face, a reality show that featured people having extreme plastic surgery to look more like their favorite celebrities. Late in the year, on Dateline NBC, the debonair investigative journalist Chris Hansen premiered a new series of special reports targeting adult men who were trying to have sex with underage teenagers they’d met on the internet.

To Catch a Predator ran for three years, and its unique selling point seemed to be that it was, as Jimmy Kimmel once jokingly referred to it, “Punk’d for pedophiles.” The series touted its noble intentions—identifying and exposing people who might prey on children—but the format of the show clarified that its main focus was entertainment. Unwitting men who’d chatted online with adults pretending to be children would be invited to a house rigged with cameras, where actors (“decoys,” in the show’s parlance) who were over 18 but looked younger would welcome them in, chat chirpily in Mickey Mouse helium voices, and then disappear so that Hansen could take over. “How are you?” he’d ask in a faux-friendly tone, before revealing the cameras, the chat logs, the scale of their reprobation. To Catch a Predator was, essentially, a prank show with a monstrous twist, Candid Camera with the prospect of prison time and a spot on the sex-offender registry. “When a TV show makes you feel sorry for potential child rapists, you know it’s doing something wrong,” Charlie Brooker argued in The Guardian in 2008. (A few years later, possibly in response to the NBC show, he wrote one of the darkest episodes of Black Mirror, in which a cheery host tortures and humiliates a woman accused of child predation while audiences cheer.)

Predators, a documentary by David Osit recently released on Paramount+, homes in on that feeling of reluctant empathy, where we’re forced to confront multiple truths at once: Yes, To Catch a Predator was targeting men who were trying to doing something monstrous; yes, the show was raising awareness about the grooming of children online; yes, it was also doing so in a way that turned personal transgression into public drama, appealing to our basest desires to see people disgraced, from the comfort of our couch. By 2004, this kind of “humilitainment”—a term that the law professor Amy Adler devised to describe the fetishization of punishment on camera exemplified by Abu Ghraib—wasn’t just “the master narrative of reality TV,” as Adler put it, but “a template for contemporary culture.”

[Read: The cruel social experiment of reality TV]

Watching Predators, I thought of Janet Malcolm’s observation that “every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” Osit is interested not only in the moral complicity of exposing someone on camera but also in the technical aspects of how that exposure is carried out, from the camera angles and lighting setups right down to the interviews and signed release forms. The documentary begins with a segment from the Dateline show: We hear a phone call, as an unnamed man charms a girl, calling her “so sweet” and telling her that he has to stop at Walmart to pick up some things “so I don’t get you pregnant.” As the conversation plays out, we see the house being staged as a set, lenses being adjusted, the zipper on a girl’s hoodie being pulled up. We’re led to wonder what it means to capture the worst day of someone’s life on camera, how banal the preparation is, and how guilty Osit is himself in re-airing the show’s footage.

To make a documentary is to have a kind of godlike power over someone else’s narrative, Predators suggests, and yet it’s an authority that To Catch a Predator wore extremely lightly. The series followed a tight formula: introduction, preamble, revelation, and then the absurd coda, during which Hansen would tell the ensnared man, “You’re free to go,” only for police officers to ambush him outside as he tried to leave. The moment that the subjects realized they’d been caught was the instant around which the show was constructed, as we watched them register their new reality with horror, denial, and—often—desperate pleas for clemency. “What you’re seeing is effectively someone else’s life end,” Mark de Rond, an ethnographer interviewed for Predators, tells Osit. “And they realize it.” Early in Predators, we see a man in a Red Sox hat weep and clutch his face while Hansen remains wholly unruffled, almost unresponsive, the consummate TV professional whose mien does not falter. He’s calm to the point of serenity; in some episodes, he undeniably seems to be enjoying his part in the proceedings.

The question throughout is how anyone could ever have been entertained by such a grim presentation, as Osit splices in footage of the show being lauded by Oprah Winfrey (“I don’t understand why the guys sit down and talk to you!” she jokes to Hansen, while her audience laughs), Kimmel, and Jon Stewart. Predators also gestures at the pop-cultural fixation on girls that underpinned this particular era: Britney Spears, the Olsen twins, Vanity Fair’s “It’s Raining Teens” cover from 2003. One particularly caustic moment in the documentary shows the TV host Joe Scarborough interviewing Hansen about an episode of To Catch a Predator that led to one man’s death by suicide—the man shot himself after local police and a Dateline crew surrounded his house as part of a pedophilia sting; NBC eventually resolved a subsequent lawsuit claiming wrongful death—right before Scarborough mockingly teases an upcoming clip about Spears’s second trip to rehab. Awkward? Yes. Self-aware? Not in the slightest. The media ecosystem of the 2000s thrived on exactly this kind of cognitive dissonance, as talking heads scolded the very women they relied on for clicks and ratings.

But worse was still yet to come. Osit follows up his examination of To Catch a Predator by considering the internet copycats who came after it, embedding with a particularly puffed-up and dystopian YouTube personality who calls himself Skeet Hansen, in tribute to his predecessor. At first, Skeet Hansen’s efforts seem ludicrous. His “decoy,” “T Coy,” is transparently not a teenager (even the men she invites into a motel room seem unconvinced on that front), and his operation is so ham-fisted that he occasionally dresses his friend up as a police officer, with a makeshift badge and a walkie-talkie. But Osit’s interview with T Coy is revelatory. She was abused as a child, she tells him, and that’s why she’s so committed now to helping punish people who might hurt children. It’s the first time anything in Predators has felt clear-cut, and when Osit, later in the movie, shares a revelation of his own that sheds light on his interest in the show, it’s all the more destabilizing.

The fact that the first six minutes of Predators are essentially taken wholesale from To Catch a Predator, with the presumption that the footage will land very differently than it did in 2004, seems to suggest progress. Osit is relying on contemporary viewers—who have lived through the public demonization of so many fragile women and the bad-faith deployment of “save the children”–style campaigns—to have a quite distinct reaction to the show two decades later. (The woman subjected to dozens of death threats after being caught on Coldplay’s kiss cam might have a very different read on how far we’ve actually come.) To really want to protect children, Osit insinuates, would mean having to try harder to understand the perpetrators of abuse, not just vilifying them for cheap gratification. The final scene of the documentary, open-ended and unsettling, implies that Predators hasn’t achieved the kind of enlightenment its director hoped it would. But for how it illuminates a truly strange and callous moment in culture, it’s one of the best documentaries of the year.