‘Predators’ Review: How ‘To Catch a Predator’ Sold Humiliation as Entertainment

In his seminal 1975 book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault wrote, “Today, criminal justice functions and justifies itself only by this perpetual reference to something other than itself, by this unceasing reinscription in non-juridical systems.” Foucault certainly couldn’t have predicted the existence or meteoric rise (and fall) of To Catch a Predator, the Dateline NBC spinoff series that blurred the line between news reportage, reality show, and vigilante justice, and aired from 2004 to 2007. But the notion that punishment in the public square would eventually re-emerge in televisual form, providing a new type of panoptic threat to dissuade potential criminals, is a natural extension of his ideas.

David Osit’s Predators moves beyond recounting the controversial show’s history. The documentary begins by interrogating the flawed, contradictory, but very human impulses that drove Chris Hansen, To Catch a Predator’s host and creative force. Hansen, first and foremost, saw his show as a public service, filling in a gap that couldn’t be filled by the police. And as his targets—pedophiles—are perhaps the most despised group of criminals, the show’s ethical deficiencies, including both turning the frequently sad, harrowing gotcha-interventions into mindless entertainment for the masses and often making it harder for prosecutors to actually convict these men, were mostly overlooked by both the creators and viewers.

To Catch a Predator’s tactics—the use of a decoy to lure suspected pedophiles to a home only for Hansen to walk out followed by a SWAT team-like swarm of cameramen and boom operators—gave Hansen an aura of authority and an instantaneous power over the pedophiles he confronted. And these rug-pulls, replicated again when right after being told they could freely leave, the suspects were immediately arrested by police waiting outside the house, were a large part of the show’s appeal. The power and control Hansen had in these situations also served to falsely empower his viewers, who were instantly granted the moral high ground, allowing them to cheer on his essentially autocratic role as judge, jury, and executioner.

Osit’s intention in drawing our attention to all this isn’t necessarily to draw sympathy toward the pedophiles that found themselves in To Catch a Predator’s crosshairs, but to examine the repercussions that its tactics had on audiences and popular culture. Throughout Predators, Osit speaks to Cambridge ethnographer Mark de Rond, who at one point exclaims, “If you show these men as human beings, the show breaks down.” Unused, raw footage pointedly shows both Hansen and police officers treating the suspects, who were at times suicidal, with more empathy than they exhibit in what aired on TV. And that this footage remained on the cutting-room floor makes sense, as the show would have operated in a moral gray area by presenting its targets as real people and as such made it easier for audiences to take less delight in their capture.

A work of trenchant inquiry, Predators eventually covers the show’s controversial final episode, in which a Texas district attorney committed suicide during a sting, before then expanding its perspective from the show to its effects on others involved in its making and the culture at large, such as the rise of internet vigilante justice. One police officer describes the incident as “a stain on my soul,” regretting that he didn’t put a stop to Hansen’s questionably manipulative use of law enforcement much earlier, while Dan Schrack, the decoy who talked extensively with the DA to lure him in, struggles to talk about the trauma he still lives with from that day.

As the documentary moves into its third act, Osit’s presence gradually becomes more foregrounded, with his connection to the show he regularly watched adding an additional layer of nuance and complexity to an already fascinating portrait of a strange pop-cultural object. Along with exploring some of the many knockoffs that To Catch a Predator spawned—including one particularly absurd, and distressingly popular, one hosted by American YouTuber Skeet Hansen, who’s catchphrase after blindsiding his targets is “You’ve just been skeeted”—Osit sits down with Chris Hansen himself to discuss the legacy of To Catch a Predator, as well as his new YouTube channel, which effectively traffics in similarly ethically dubious tactics.

While Osit playfully includes visual touches that echo To Catch a Predator, his interview approach with Hansen is decidedly even-handed. At one point, he pushes back when Hansen says that he “does this for a higher purpose” and questions his sincerity for the way he asked pedophiles what made them do what they did. Through Osit’s various interviews, and de Rond’s intermittent commentary, it becomes fairly clear that there’s little attempt on Hansen’s part to learn what made these men what they are or interest in their eventual rehabilitation.

This is about, in Foucault’s terms, an attempt to enact justice through non-juridical means—to punish criminals outside the boundaries of the legal system. Do these men deserve it? Perhaps so, and Osit certainly admits as much, but he also recognizes that To Catch a Predator sold humiliation as entertainment in the guise of legitimizing law-and-order punitivism.

Always exhibiting a deftness of touch and willingness to continue probing a cultural taboo that’s now, more than ever, a delicate and charged topic, Obit also challenges our preconceptions of a much-maligned group. And ultimately, he leaves the audience with far more questions than answers, and provocatively so, with one rising above the rest: If we don’t at least try to see the humanity in the monsters, do we risk becoming monsters ourselves?