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New film Primetime, with Robert Pattinson, centres on the divisive series which performed sting operations on would-be abusers. A ratings hit, it caused much debate about TV ethics.

In November 2004, an incendiary new segment, To Catch a Predator, aired on US television as part of NBC’s current affairs show Dateline. It was packaged as a regular news report, involving a television crew camping out at a suburban address and waiting for strangers to arrive.

Except these weren’t any ordinary visitors: they had been lured by a group of digital vigilantes, self-dubbed Perverted Justice, who made it their mission to ensnare would-be paedophiles. A “decoy” – an adult actor masquerading as a teen – was deployed to meet them at the door. Hidden cameras captured their entrance, before the show’s presenter Chris Hansen appeared and confronted them with their incriminating digital footprints. Outside, local law enforcement would bide their time to arrest them.

Warning: This article contains references to suicide and sexual abuse that some may find distressing

To Catch a Predator took the US by storm. Part investigative journalism and part reality TV circus, the series horrified and gripped viewers, soon attracting an average of 7 million watches per episode. Hansen’s show blurred the boundaries of reportage, real-life policing and entertainment: “An easy, queasy morality tale of rightful comeuppance and social humiliation,” according to The Guardian’s Adrian Horton. Quickly, it was catapulted to the coveted 21:00 viewing slot on US TV, competing with ABC’s lauded series Lost. That’s where Primetime, a provocative new film about the controversial show, kicks off.

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In an Oscar-tipped performance, Robert Pattinson harnesses the distinctive charisma of the show’s presenter, Hansen. The reporter cut his teeth in investigations and, one year before To Catch a Predator’s first broadcast, carried out a sting operation in Cambodia, with the resulting programme exposing paedophiles exploiting child sex trafficking. It provided the blueprint for this show much closer to home.

“This was a very special moment in the history of western civilisation where [for the first time] kids lived online and came of age online,” David Osit, director of a 2025 documentary about Hansen’s show, Predators, tells the BBC. “It was a moment when young people were [using the internet] in a remarkably unregulated way, and adults found out about it. It horrified them.”

“This was a very special moment in the history of western civilisation where [for the first time] kids lived online and came of age online,” David Osit, director of a 2025 documentary about Hansen’s show, Predators, tells the BBC. “It was a moment when young people were [using the internet] in a remarkably unregulated way, and adults found out about it. It horrified them.”

As explored in his documentary, Osit is himself a survivor of child sexual abuse and became fascinated with Hansen’s show in his 20s as a way to try to understand why offenders commit their crimes. It was later when he came across online fandoms dedicated to To Catch a Predator that he decided to make his documentary. The final section of Predators features interviews with Hansen, who claims that his work has been for survivors like Osit and “serving a greater purpose”.

A precedent had been set for To Catch a Predator by another reality show Cheaters, which debuted in 2000 and enacted stings on unfaithful partners. “The concept was similar: people submitting their partners to be ‘caught in the act’ of cheating,” says culture journalist Louis Staples. “It made for oddly enthralling viewing, turning private indiscretions into public humiliation and retribution.”

A new phase of reality TV

However the popularity of Hansen’s show arguably spawned a new era of sensationalism in reality TV, following the foundational era of “social experiment”-styled shows like Big Brother and Survivor. “To Catch a Predator encapsulates what I call the ‘Wild West’ era of reality TV,” asserts Staples. “Around 2004, we started to see a wave of more extreme, spectacle-driven shows, like the horrifying [cosmetic surgery] makeover show The Swan and the dating show There’s Something About Miriam [in which a group of men dated a woman who they were not told was transgender, until a climactic reveal]”. To Catch a Predator similarly represents the gradual upping of the ante in the reality genre, where it felt like nothing was off-limits in the pursuit of headlines and ratings.

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To Catch a Predator’s formula always entailed Hansen reading aloud the targets’ sexually explicit chat logs word-for-word to them and retorting with witty clapbacks. Before he unveiled himself, the show’s unwitting subjects were also often goaded by the decoys into making risqué comments or even physically exposing themselves. What is possibly most striking about To Catch a Predator, however, is the way in which its lurid content and mocking tone were underscored by the idea that Hansen’s team was enacting social justice.

“Why you see the issue of paedophilia, child predation and child trafficking [become] such an issue in politics is because it is an extraordinarily easy issue to align yourself with,” says Osit. Despite being a survivor of child sexual abuse himself, he received death threats for questioning Hansen’s methods in his documentary, as well as showing the more sympathetic raw footage of the show’s alleged predators as obtained through Freedom of Information requests – depicting them pleading, explaining their backstories which included mental illness, and expressing remorse. “It’s a pretty binary good v evil dynamic, even though societally we have also contributed massively… to a world where we, through the media, overtly sexualise young people and teenagers.” Predators touches on the hyper-sexualisation at the time of a teenage Britney Spears, for example.

“We don’t, as a society, believe that child predators need protection,” Osit adds. “We don’t accept them as human beings often, so [it’s understandable] that we’re not terribly concerned as to protecting their identity. [But] if you can decide that certain groups don’t need protection, you can then start making an argument that other people don’t need protections.”

One particularly grim case put a spotlight on the show’s ethical murkiness. In 2006, a sting operation was attempted in Texas on assistant district attorney Louis William “Bill” Conradt. But when he failed to show, Hansen’s TV crew and the police (with a hastily drawn-up search and arrest warrant) descended upon his home, soon after which Conradt killed himself. Conradt’s sister later sued the show for $105 million, and the case was settled out of court.

Osit’s documentary reveals the extent to which Hansen’s team were in cahoots with police, with officers allegedly being paid for featuring in the show and routinely wearing cameras (before the dawn of bodycams) for more compelling footage. Hansen responded to Conradt’s death in 2021 by alleging that the attorney possessed child pornography, a claim disputed by Esquire in their report on his suicide. He also said that, while it was “a difficult moment”, he didn’t “feel responsible” and one could “assume” Conradt “didn’t want to face the music”.

How its format continues to thrive  

The original To Catch a Predator strand was cancelled by NBC in 2008 – but its ratings-chasing format continues today in almost its original form, expanded into a standalone series. Takedown with Chris Hansen appears on TruBlu, the streaming service he cofounded in 2022. Meanwhile online, copycats have also proliferated on YouTube and other platforms.

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“Now everyone has the potential to recreate this type of content on their phones” says Staples, pointing towards Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere which depicts such stings. “We like to think we’ve moved on from [To Catch a Predator], but the attention economy proves that we’re still gravitating towards similarly extreme content on social media.

At least so far, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington has been all pomp and little obvious progress on pressing issues.

From the ceremonial welcoming at a military air base on Wednesday to the honour-guard arrival at the White House this morning, President Donald Trump rolled out the red carpet – literally and figuratively – for his Chinese counterpart.

The public remarks from the two leaders have teemed with warm words and diplomatic niceties. In a statement before today’s formal meetings, Xi announced a gift of Chinese pandas and unveiled a new student exchange programme.

“Let us keep advancing the cause of friendship between our two peoples and work together to build a better world,” he said.

Trump, for his part, outlined some of the topics the leaders planned to discuss in their meetings, including “pressing issues concerning security, technology, and superintelligence” – using his preferred term for artificial intelligence.

“The decisions we make in these areas today can promote peace and prosperity for decades and decades to come,” he said.

The marching bands and military flyovers on Thursday may serve a larger purpose, however – at least for Trump.

“This is a little bit of intentional pageantry to talk up the positive vibes of the summit,” Jennifer Welch, chief economic analyst for Bloomberg Economics, told the BBC. “This is very much how President Trump sees the summit and the role he plays in the US-China relationship, as ballast to provide stability.”

Even so, there is still an edge to some of Xi’s rhetoric, she notes.

In remarks at the White House, the Chinese leader again mentioned the “Thucydides trap” – a theory that shifts in global power tend to lead to conflict between rising and declining nations.

“China and the United States are different in national conditions, but through candid, in-depth and continued dialogue, our two countries can understand each other better, seek common ground while shelving differences, and build up mutual trust,” Xi said.

The obstacles in the way of reaching any substantive agreement between the two nations are significant, however. When Trump and Xi met in Beijing in May, the men agreed to form boards of trade and investment to oversee economic interactions, and little more.

On Wednesday, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said a year-long trade “truce” between the two nations that had kept tariffs lower would be extended another two months. Financial analysts expect a further extension could come before this week’s summit ends, given that neither side wants a renewal of last year’s trade war.

The outlook for progress is much dimmer on other topics, like the US war with Iran, the Ukraine war and regulating AI.

China’s reneging on promises to buy more American agricultural products and to also sell more rare earth minerals to the US is helping cloud the outlook. China, meanwhile, is watching to see if Trump follows through on a proposed sale of American weapons to Taiwan, which has been on hold for months.

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Watch: Here’s why Trump’s been so keen on Xi’s visit

When it comes to AI, China and the US have two very different goals for any agreement on the race to develop the technology, Robyn Klingler-Vida, a professor of political economy at Kings College London, told the BBC.

“On the US side, it’s about existential risk and slowing down AI potentially,” she said. “Whereas in China, it’s about acceleration, maybe winning the AI tech race and the application of AI to the real economy.”

A number of leading American AI executives plan to attend tonight’s formal state dinner at the White House, which many view as a means for the US side to tout its current technological advantage.

Muscle-flexing aside, more pageantry – and the promise of stability – may be the end result of Xi’s China visit, even with additional face time between the two leaders to come before Xi departs on Friday afternoon.

“What China talks about is metaphysical and abstract. The United States wants to solve specific problems,” Miles Yu, who served as principal China policy planner and strategist to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during Trump’s first term, told the BBC.

“These different approaches are not going to lead to any result.”

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