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A new documentary delving into the cultural phenomenon of NBC’sTo Catch a Predator, which debuted in the early 2000s and featured host Chris Hansen, will follow the “rise and staggering fall of the show, and the world it helped create.”
A press release for the film, titled Predators, describes the NBC series as “a popular television show designed to hunt down child predators and lure them to a film set, where they would be interviewed and eventually arrested.” As part of its exploration into “America’s obsession with watching people at their lowest,” the documentary will examine “the murk of human nature to observe hunter, predator, subject and spectator alike.”
In a statement, director David Osit said that he grew up watching To Catch a Predator as a young adult and experienced “a complex stew of discomfort and schadenfreude as child predators were lured into a house, interviewed and ultimately arrested with cameras rolling for our national entertainment.”
“I couldn’t have imagined the depths of the journey I’d end up going on – how making this film would not only challenge the limits of my own empathy, but reflect the tenuous morality behind how we tell stories, report news, and make film,” Osit continued. The filmmaker also shared his longtime frustration with true crime docs and his realization that it stemmed from the “illusion” that “after watching a true crime story, the crime will be solved and we’ll get all the answers.”
Instead, he sought to make Predators “a film that was about what happens – and what are we capable of doing to each other – when answers can’t be found?”
The upcoming documentary will include interviews with journalists, actors, law enforcers, academics, and Hansen, who hosted To Catch a Predator from 2004 to 2007. Osit, Kellen Quinn, and Jamie Gonçalves serve as producers on the project.
Although the show was cancelled two years after Texas assistant district attorneyBill Conradt committed suicide after a sting operation involving Dateline and To Catch A Predator, spin-offs later released in the series’ same format, including To Catch a Con Man and To Catch a Car Thief.
“Already one of the most talked-about entries at this year’sSundanceFilm Festival,Predators— filmmaker David Osit’s compelling, critical and most-likely-to-cause-nausea doc on the show that turnedschadenfreudeinto syndication-ratings gold and spawned copycats galore — has a few questions of its own it would like to ask,” Rolling Stone‘s David Fear wrote in his review in January.
“The movie and its maker are also curious about the effect of the show itself, how its quest for justice may have become muddled along the way, and what its popularity might say about us,” Fear wrote. “Why have we kept tuning in to see these creeps get caught? Why has it taken a television show to bust them? In the long run, hasTo Catch a Predatoractually done more harm than good?”
