Predators director David Osit spent a lot of his time in college watching NBC Dateline’s To Catch A Predator. He’s one of millions to do so, myself included. To Catch A Predator is a longstanding cultural phenomenon, reliant on the notion that there is something obviously satisfying and schadenfreudian about watching people with intent to sexually abuse children be publicly humiliated and then arrested.
Osit was interested in To Catch A Predator for personal reasons. As he began to understand that he had been sexually abused as a child, he turned to To Catch A Predator for potential illumination on what made child sexual abusers tick. “Help me understand,” Chris Hansen often asks of the cornered pedophiles.
Osit’s striking new documentary Predators is also seeking clarity, only this time the mirror is reflected at those who have turned predator-hunting into a lucrative entertainment business. “Help me understand,” Predators asks. What is the purpose and value, exactly, of To Catch A Predator and its legacy? Predators is not so much an exposé on a single person or cultural artifact than on an entertainment loophole allowing the masses to partake in some of our most conservative cultural consumption behaviors guilt-free.
Predators is divided into sections: a section on To Catch A Predator, a section on its modern day YouTube knock-offs, and a section on Chris Hansen’s newest offshoot programming “Takedown With Chris Hansen”, which streams on his crime-oriented digital platform, TruBlu. Osit speaks to many involved in the creation of To Catch A Predator, including police officers, the actors who played the decoys in the sting operations, and eventually Chris Hansen himself. He shadows YouTube predator hunter Skeeter Jean, or “Skeet Hansen” through one of his DIY predator sting operations.
All arguments for programs like To Catch A Predator run along the same track: it’s educational for concerned parents and it both humiliates and legally punishes the most objectionable kind of bad guys. It’s clean cut. Certainly no one is going to want to hear out, or God forbid defend, pedophiles. But Predators reveals that this pedophile-catching content mostly benefits some of our most flawed systems. At one point in Predators, a moderator at a promotional event for Chris Hansen’s latest predator-hunting venture gleefully praises the audience for their participation by stating, “You are the best law enforcement tool in America.”
In the eyes of these shows, the audience is on one hand a tool to enforce justice, and on the other hand, a cash cow for modern Hansen-copycats who often rake in over a million views per sting operation, regardless of how sloppily they operate. During one predator hunt, a suicidal mark sobs for two hours in a hotel room while a cameraman with a beaded friendship bracelet reading “Batman” films impassively. Self-described Chris Hansen impersonator Skeet Hansen awkwardly informs the mark that he’s “just been Skeeted”. This hardly seems like a shining example of doing the good work; if anything, the practice is one of giddy cruelty instead of meaningful justice.
Predators does not suggest that we have to hold pedophiles more gently (though a handful of the documentary’s subjects admit to feeling pangs of empathy), but reveals that To Catch A Predator and its modern YouTube byproducts allow for a free pass to buy into the police state and exploitative entertainment founded on useless, fumbling nods to interpersonal justice. To Catch A Predator and its offshoots aren’t making pedophiles disappear. I have no interest in being “the best tool in law enforcement” or watching the content equivalent to creeps on TikTok filming people in crisis for clout, or even worse: masking their vigilante justice as activism or social good.
Help us understand, Predators asks. If the purpose is to catch these men and show to the world that they are unsafe, why hasn’t child sexual abuse been obliterated from our culture? How do the people making these programs and videos justify acting as an arm of the law for the sake of entertainment?
Despite all the time Osit spent watching To Catch A Predator in his youth, he never felt he received any clear answers. The revelation of Predators is that much like the pedophiles cornered on their shows, Hansen, his cohorts, and his copycats all fail to have a meaningful answer for what, exactly, their show meaningfully provides. Predators’ mindful disassembling of this slice of our zeitgeist is remarkable.
