If “To Catch a Predator” taught us anything, it was about the hollow authority asserted by a man in a well-cut suit. Between 2004 and 2007, NBC’s pedophile-baiting “Dateline” spinoff captured the imagination of the American public, announcing itself as not just reality-based entertainment but a protective public service — largely on the strength of host Chris Hansen’s suave, smooth presence as he cornered and questioned potential sex offenders with the apparent clout of a cop or lawyer, as the cameras kept rolling. Never mind that he was a mere newsman, or that the show’s manipulations rendered most of its cases impossible to prosecute. “To Catch a Predator” delivered justice as the people preferred to see it: visibly, ruthlessly, and on television. David Osit was among the many who were hooked; 20 years on, his measured, nuanced and finally gut-punching documentary “Predators” wonders why.
The premise for “To Catch a Predator” was so simple — naive, even — that it’s surprising it worked for as long as it did. With the assistance of a civilian volunteer group called Perverted Justice, producers would identify men seeking sex with minors in online chatrooms, using decoy actors to lure them to a secretly camera-rigged house where they would eventually be ambushed by Hansen and, later, local law enforcement. It’s a cheap formula that spawned any number of even cheaper derivatives on TV and online, feeding a public fascination with deviant criminal behavior that still hasn’t been sated by a glut of true-crime content across all media.
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Osit is duly conscious that his own film, searching and humane as it is, nonetheless stands on that same lurid audience impulse — it opens tensely, after all, on sustained, stomach-churning audio and video footage from “To Catch a Predator” of a 37-year-old man engaging in verbal foreplay with what he believes to be a 13-year-old girl, before Hansen disrupts the scene. “Predators” is thus slow to condemn but precise and insistent in its moral inquiry of what the show has wrought — and its lingering impact on participants, viewers and abuse survivors. Premiering in competition at Sundance, “Predators” would be a dead cert for high-profile distribution and extensive festival play even it weren’t this smartly and sensitively executed.
“Help me understand.” It’s with those three words, Osit points out, that Hansen would often begin his interviews with his flustered, red-handed quarry — misleadingly so, as the tone taken by episodes was invariably more retributive than conversational. Pedophilia, after all, is perhaps the most universally censured of all crimes, and the show’s air of judge-jury-and-executioner control was enabled by its certainty that viewers would be unambivalently on its side. Psychological probing was never on the agenda: The slick, righteous pull of the episodes stands in stark contrast to remarkable, untelevised raw footage that Osit has uncovered of police rather more temperately interrogating the show’s targets after the initial capture. “You’re going to live through this,” one female cop gently says to a crumbling perpetrator who’s rather less convinced.
“When you show these men as human beings, the show kind of breaks down,” observes one of the film’s recurring talking heads, Cambridge ethnographer Mark de Rond. For “To Catch a Predator,” dehumanization was the easier, grabbier approach, and the less controversial one — at least until an infamous incident in the final series, where a botched sting culminated in the suicide of the perpetrator, a Texas assistant DA, as cops and cameramen closed in.
The tragedy wasn’t exempt from NBC’s opportunistic promotional style — Osit excavates a sizzly trailer for the episode that takes a tasteless “never before on TV” tack — but the show was canceled shortly after, and revisionist skepticism of its moral standing pivots heavily on the event, including for many of the parties involved. In the most openly regretful admission made by the “To Catch a Predator” actors interviewed by Osit, the fateful episode’s decoy Dan Schrack talks about enduring trauma over his role in proceedings, while one police officer describes his own participation as “a stain on my soul.” A soft-spoken and patiently non-leading interviewer — kept mostly off-camera until the doc’s more personally-oriented denouement — Osit gives his subjects ample space to consider questions that he, too, is still plagued by.
One interviewee with his answers fully prepared is, unsurprisingly, Hansen himself — whose extensive one-to-one with the filmmaker is the doc’s startling third-act coup, albeit not one of seismic revelations or aggressive gotcha tactics. Now in his sixties, and having left network television to cultivate his moral-crusader image on less regulated web and streaming platforms, he admits no fault regarding “To Catch a Predator” or his similarly exploitative recent endeavors. Those include an episode of his current predator-hunting series “Takedown,” which identified and vilified an 18-year-old highschooler for his relationship with a 15-year-old boy: a different dynamic from most of the cases he exposes, Hansen admits, but one he claims merits the same punishment. Is hanging out such people to dry for public amusement actually an effective criminal deterrent? Hansen diverts the question to an anecdotal recollection of the various sexual abuse victims who have thanked him for his work over the years.
It’s a confrontation as riveting as any of those that the man steered in his television prime, though Osit isn’t out to catch anyone, and Hansen won’t be caught anyway — he’s unflappably convinced of his own heroism. Asked for his thoughts on the rise of social-media vigilante stunts and copycat content creators inspired by his landmark show, he calmly answers that what they do for clicks and profit, he does “for a greater purpose.” “Predators” trusts its viewers to see as much irony or hypocrisy as they choose to in those words, though it can’t resist a caustically witty formal flourish at its close that sees the departing interviewee framed and tracked in the same multi-camera surveillance style that “To Catch a Predator” used on its human targets. Osit’s brilliant, subtly needling film leaves us unnerved and alert, but not certain of our convictions — an outcome, perhaps, that more true-crime programming should pursue.