Daniel Roher and Lance Oppenheim better be careful. Both started 2026 as documentarians, and both jumped ship to direct a narrative feature film. And, most importantly, BOTH nailed it. Tuner was a tight, exciting thriller that felt like a classic in the best ways. And Oppenheim’s Primetime is among the best of the year so far. Careful boys: if you keep this up, you’re gonna piss off both the movie makers AND the documentarians: it’s not fair to be good at both.
It’s 2006, and Friends and Seinfeld are now off of NBC’s once bulletproof Thursday night. Jeff Zucker needs to figure out what could possibly be the next big thing. He decides it’s To Catch a Predator, the show where Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) and producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever) exposed (I’m sorry, there’s no better word) child predators on live television – with help from acting decoys Del (Phoebe Bridgers) and Dan (Skyler Gisondo) – is going to get the bold spot against lost. The opportunity is not lost on Hansen, who believes this show is a culmination of the work he started doing since a 1990s India work trip.
I was curious how Lance Oppenheim was going to film Primetime. But his vision for the tale is voyeurism. This isn’t the real Chris Hansen we’re seeing. We’re with TV Chris Hansen, who sees himself as a TV god, purging the world of evil. Multiple scenes of this movie are those 2006 versions of people on camera, with the “REC” onscreen, before the rules about screen personas were developed. It’s the wild west of blurred reality, and that’s how the movie feels. Scenes with Hansen’s wife Mary (Anna Faris) feel like Lifetime Original storytelling. Regular Chris Hansen would have had normal TV conversations with his decoys about how to play a scene. TV Chris Hansen turns those conversations into a pseudo father/son relationship where they try to play catch and talk about life. Interestingly, Oppenheim makes the predators the only “real” people in Primetime’s world, putting the audience in a darkly funny, nihilistic, slightly uncomfortable frame of mind as we realize everyone sucks here in some form or another. The one exception being Decoy Dan, the real audience surrogate, and the necessary thing to latch onto for Primetime’s surreal vision to actually succeed as well as it does.
Oppenheim also hired the right actors to do the job masterfully. Playing Chris Hansen, a character so up its own ass it’s a bit of a head f*ck, Lance found perfect casting with Robert Pattinson. Twilight is officially dead: Pattinson has used that clout to dare himself with bigger and bolder projects. 2026 is his coming out party, taking different roles of all shapes and sizes. He nails the Hansen this movie is portraying: a guy who believes everything he’s doing as filtered through TV, so everything comes out inhuman and artificial, meant to be mocked. Only a great actor can pull off something as daring as that, and Pattinson dares more than most big actors working today. Merritt Wever proves she makes everything she’s in better again, playing the composite producer like a devil puppeteer cocksure in everything and eyerolling at any ounce of wholesomeness the world might offer her. Matthew Maher, Tory Revolori, Anna Faris, and Alex Winter come off the bench when they’re called to deliver. Phoebe Bridgers even brings her A game as one of the decoys. Hell real life Jeff Zucker shows up! But with respect to Pattinson, I think Primetime falls apart if Skyler Gisondo isn’t excellent. The only real moments of humanity we care about come from Dan the non union actor who just wants a SAG card. However, his first “improv” scene with Crazyfrog73 online predator confrontation walloped me in a way I wasn’t expected because of how good Gisondo is in it. I’ve been waiting for him to get a great part, and this is the first time I’ve seen him reach his potential, giving welcome humanity against that deranged Pattinson performance.
I do enjoy the wickedly funny point that To Catch a Predator was up against Lost. That show was about people trapped in some form of purgatory…which is exactly what Skyler Gisondo walks into when he shows up on set in Primetime. Here’s the darkest joke of all. Yes Lost murdered To Catch a Predator in the ratings, but Hansen probably has the last laugh, as his show still did good enough to prove you can put reality TV in primetime and succeed, a model that erupted in part because of him, and now dominates TV landscape through and through. You see how this looks right?