The Troubling True Story of “Primetime” and the Controversial Program That Inspired It
The Troubling True Story of “Primetime” and the Controversial Program That Inspired It
Emma UrdangenSat, September 26, 2026 at 11:00 AM UTC
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Chris Hansen on To Catch a Predator; Robert Pattinson in Primetime.Credit: NBC; Courtesy of A24 -
Robert Pattinson stars as former To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen in the A24 film Primetime
The movie touches on events from Hansen’s controversial show in which one of their targets, Louis William “Bill” Conradt Jr., fatally shot himself while law enforcement attempted to serve an arrest warrant
The film is partially based on a 2007 Esquire article, “Tonight on Dateline, This Man Will Die,” which was published in response to the incident
Robert Pattinson is garnering rave reviews for his performance as the former To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen and earned a nine-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival.
According to the film’s creative team, Primetime was loosely based on Hansen as he doggedly builds the popular, but controversial Dateline program that aimed to lure and catch men attempting to assault who they presumed to be children they talked to on the internet. In reality, the “victims” were adult volunteers from the group Perverted-Justice, posing as children and teens.
During a press conference at Venice, Pattinson, who also serves as a producer on Primetime, expressed that he hopes Hansen likes the film.
“I never really set out to make a movie about Chris Hansen. I would hope in some ways, like, the amount of inspiration that his character has kind of given certain people who are involved in this for like years now, I hope [it’s] some kind of compliment,” he said.
In the months leading up to Primetime’s premiere, though, Hansen has been vocal about his refusal to support the film, while maintaining he has “no issue with Robert Pattinson.” Hansen has said he was not consulted for the movie and critiqued A24 for acting in what he described as an “exploitative” and “predatory” manner by using his name, image, likeness and brand for its fictional recounting of his Dateline show.
“I think it’s an insult to the thousands of men and women who work hard every day to protect children from predators,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in September 2026. “They turn something that is very positive, very challenging and not without risk into what is essentially a horror film.”
Amid the controversy behind the film, here is everything to know about the real events that inspired Primetime.
What is Primetime about?
Robert Pattinson in Primetime.Credit: A24
Directed by documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim and written by Ajon Singh, the film follows Hansen in 2006 at the height of To Catch a Predator’s success.
Oppenheim told PEOPLE he was inspired to make the film after his wife bought him a video message on Cameo from Hansen.
“It was like everything that I felt like I had experienced from watching those Cameos was in the script, was in this depiction of Chris Hansen that felt almost very heightened, almost like a Brian DePalma movie or an Oliver Stone movie,” he said.
Pattinson plays Hansen, and the film also stars Merritt Wever as cynical producer Andie Bender, Anna Faris as Hansen’s wife, Tony Revolori as an ex-Marine child predator and Phoebe Bridgers and Skyler Gisondo as decoys.
Primetime is partially based on a 2007 Esquire article, “Tonight on Dateline, This Man Will Die,” and dramatizes events surrounding a sting operation in Murphy, Texas. The mission involved Rockwall County’s assistant district attorney Bill Conradt who died by suicide as authorities and the To Catch a Predator crew were closing in on his house following sexually explicit messages he exchanged with a decoy.
According to Oppenheim, he did not intend to make a conventional biopic about Hansen.
He was more “blown away by the theatricality of how he went about dismantling people’s lives,” Oppenheim told PEOPLE. “He would go in there and he would essentially almost have superhuman abilities that felt mythological. He like could make someone who would desperately want to be anywhere else sit down and listen to him and and essentially have a conversation with him, even though they wanted to get out of there as quick as humanly possible.”
Who is Chris Hansen?
Chris Hansen on To Catch a Predator.Credit: NBC
Before becoming the face of the controversial Dateline show watched by millions, Hansen began his journalistic career while still in college in the ‘80s reporting for WILX-TV, an NBC affiliate in Lansing, Mich.
He joined NBC in May 1993 as a correspondent for Now with Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric and continued to rise through the ranks as an investigative correspondent.
Hansen notably worked on Dateline coverage of breaking news events such as the Oklahoma City bombing, the Columbine shootings, the Unabomber and the crash of TWA Flight 800.
In 2004, Hansen began reporting on online sexual predators with To Catch a Predator. The controversial program defined Hansen’s career but he worked on other beats too.
Following the cancellation of the hit show, in 2007, he launched To Catch an ID Thief. According to NBC, in June 2006, Hansen traveled to China to report on a year-long investigation into the counterfeit prescription drug trade and how these medicines entered local pharmacies in the United States. This report won an Emmy and an IRE award.
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Hansen also received two Emmy Awards for his 2004 report on child sex trafficking in Cambodia, for which he went undercover in a dramatic mission to rescue some of the children.
In 2013, Hansen and NBC parted ways after a 20-year career with the network, per Variety, and he has gone on to work as a TV host, primarily through his platform TruBlu.
What was To Catch a Predator?
Skyler Gisondo in Primetime.Credit: Courtesy of A24
To Catch a Predator, which ran from 2004 to 2007, followed Hansen as he confronted alleged sex offenders arriving at a home to meet the “children” they were talking to online.
The show catapulted Hansen into fame, making him a recognizable name in pop and digital culture, despite apprehension from other journalists, law enforcement and legal experts concerned about the ethical and legal ramifications that could arise from the segment’s methods.
The show was made in collaboration with Perverted-Justice, an online watchdog group. The organization provided the personnel who posed as minors online to lure men into engaging in sexually explicit conversations with them, and they would then arrange a meeting at a house prepared for filming. When a target arrived, they were welcomed by someone playing a teenage boy or girl, and later Hansen would appear with a printed transcript of their online communications.
Many arrests were made over the course of the show but most of which were later deemed illegal because of the show’s methods.
In a CBS blog post, former CBS News reporter Brian Montopoli criticized the segment and argued that Hansen and his team were solely interested in ratings, claiming that it didn’t operate with journalistic integrity and made the news rather than reporting it. Furthermore, Montopoli accused the show of vigilantism. These criticisms act as a throughline in Primetime.
Hansen responded to claims of the same ilk to The Hollywood Reporter in 2026, saying, “From the beginning, we were transparent about what we did, how we did it and the results. The film’s timeline, scenario and conversations are completely made up. It just didn’t happen. I pitched [the stings] because I thought it was a critical issue, and Dateline approved it. It was never meant to be its own series. It was one of the many stories I did for Dateline and NBC.”
Although To Catch a Predator ended its run in 2007, Hansen has continued investigating alleged sex crimes on his own true crime streaming service, TruBlu with his investigative show Takedown with Chris Hansen. The host even bought ad space for TruBlu to run before screenings of Primetime, per The Hollywood Reporter.
What happened to Bill Conradt in real life?
In November 2006, the To Catch a Predator team arrived in Murphy, Texas, to prepare for a four-day operation. There, Louis William “Bill” Conradt Jr., a 56-year-old assistant district attorney had communicated online with a decoy posing as a 13-year-old boy, but he did not appear at the agreed location. So the operation moved to his home.
According to NBC News, a police spokesman said, “police forced their way into Conradt’s Terrell home after hearing a gunshot when he refused to answer the door.” The officers were attempting to serve a search and arrest warrant, but instead found that Conradt had died by suicide.
Conradt’s sister would later sue NBC for $105 million, arguing that the network had crossed the line between journalism and television spectacle, per The Guardian. “Having trespassed and invaded upon Bill’s property to broadcast a spectacle to millions, the defendant took no more steps toward protecting him than are received by a gladiator or bull,” she explained.
In 2008, a federal judge allowed key parts of the lawsuit to proceed and wrote that a reasonable jury could conclude that NBC had no longer limited itself to reporting on police work, but had become the center of the operation, encouraging tactics designed to create a more dramatic effect for TV.
NBC disputed these claims and they reached an out-of-court settlement that same year.
To Catch a Predator ended shortly after the fallout from Conradt’s death and the enormous amount of negative press circling the ethics of the show.
Hansen expressed to The Hollywood Reporter in September 2026 that it was “unfortunate” Conradt died by suicide, and said, “You can draw your own conclusions as to why. They found child pornography on his computer. He had sexually explicit conversations with two different decoys posing as 13-year-old boys.”
Hansen further stated: “Obviously, you don’t want anybody taking their own life, but that was a decision made by that individual. They’ll ramp it up in the film, I’m sure, and make it more dramatic than it really was. It was based upon an Esquire article that came out years ago that was a bit of a hit piece then, and apparently it’s part of the narrative in the film.”
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