The Dateline NBC series “To Catch a Predator,” which aired from 2004 to 2007, largely adhered to a straightforward formula: Hire an actor who looks younger than his or her age to lure an adult who is seeking a sexual encounter with a child. Then, when the would-be predator arrives at a house, have the show’s host, the reporter Chris Hansen, emerge to interview the man, who is suddenly made aware that he is on camera, and who will ultimately be arrested upon exiting.
But as David Osit’s probing, troubling documentary “Predators” demonstrates, the sociological implications of the show were (and are) anything but simple, beginning with what the series’ popularity suggests about the viewers who watched it. Mark de Rond, an ethnographer who is interviewed at length in the film, is fascinated by the moment in which Hansen confronts his subject: “What you’re seeing is effectively someone else’s life end,” de Rond says, “and they realize it.” Why is it that TV watchers are drawn to seeing a person, however horrible, humiliated in this way?
That question is just a starting point for Osit’s investigation. The director meets with actors who played the decoys and are still disturbed by what they saw and facilitated. What was shown onscreen was only part of a bigger picture. Greg Stumbo, a former Kentucky attorney general who looked at the series as an effective solution to a difficult investigative problem — “Law enforcement is not equipped to conduct these types of operations at this point,” he is shown saying in an old news clip — adopts a more measured tone when Osit shows him video of a suspect breaking down in a subsequent police interrogation. Perhaps that man, if he serves his time, Stumbo says, could be rehabilitated and “become a productive member of society.”
For that matter, where did law enforcement stop and the production of TV entertainment begin? Was Hansen acting as a journalist, or was he deputizing himself in a role more properly played by the police? Were cops present to support the production or was the production there to support crime-fighting? Osit also explores the phenomenon of copycat programs that have sprung up since the show’s end.
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