To Catch a Predator’ Became a Ratings Sensation By Exposing Internet Sex Predators. A New Sundance Documentary Examines Its Complicated Legacy

Like many Americans in the early aughts, documentary filmmaker David Osit watched “To Catch a Predator,” a hidden camera reality TV show that followed journalist Chris Hansen working in coordination with law enforcement while conducting sting operations that exposed adult men who were hoping to have sex with minors. “I found it fascinating and weird and strangely addictive,” he admits. “In many ways, it was sort of the template for modern true crime TV.” But he never really gave the NBC series much thought until years later when he came across an article about Bill Conradt, a Texas assistant district attorney who committed suicide in 2007 after police served him with a warrant stemming from one of Hansen’s online investigations into potential pedophiles. Hansen and his crew were on the scene when Conradt shot himself. The episode eventually aired, but NBC’s journalism was criticized for breaching ethical lines and Conradt’s family sued. “To Catch a Predator” went off the air the next year. Reading about the story led Osit down the rabbit hole, as he researched more about the show’s legacy he discovered that there was a small, but intense online “To Catch a Predator” fandom. It was one that had collected, through FOIA requests, raw footage from the making of the show. Seeing it put him in a discombobulating headspace. “Watching it was a different kind of emotional experience,” he remembers. “I would view this raw material and feel kind of heartbroken for these men in a way that I never felt when I’d watch the show, but then I’d read a chat log of their comments, and feel disgusted by them again, but then I go back hear a phone call between them and a decoy and feel bad for them again. So I kept having this emotional ping pong in me, and I started to imagine how compelling it might be to make that the spine for a film for an audience’s viewing experience.” The result of Osit’s investigation into the impact of “To Catch a Predator” is “Predators,” a new documentary that premieres at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and one that features interviews with Hansen, as well as many of the people in the show’s orbit — from adult actors who played teenage decoys to law enforcement officials who arrested the men. The finished film raises fascinating, sometimes troubling questions about the tenuous line that can exist between journalism and vigilantism, as well as our strange fascination with watching stories about depravity. “What happens with a lot of true crime TV is it gets to a place where you’re basically just confirming what people are already afraid of,” he says. “It helps put a lot more faith and trust in law enforcement by saying that these are the people who can really fix society if there are things that are scaring us and are broken. That is the only solution ever really posed by a true crime show. There’s not an incidence of ‘To Catch A Predator,’ where, instead of police arresting the men, they are also met by an army of therapists who could try to help them get through their lives and fix the problem that they’ve been suffering with since childhood.” It is not, to be clear, that Osit is minimizing the behavior of sexual predators who target children — it’s clearly one of the worst crimes anyone can commit. He just thinks that “To Catch a Predator,” which often had Hansen rolling into frame and asking the men he’s just exposed as pedophiles what drives them to act on these horrific impulses, isn’t really interested in answering that question. And he’s not sure that public service can also be entertainment. “Everybody has this sort of inner sense of good and bad and right and wrong and good and evil, but basically, we all sort of carry simultaneously empathy and cruelty,” he says. “We all have that in us to different degrees. It’s the basis of our civilization. And the show, I realized, was really able to turn that into a formula for engaging audiences. And that’s what a lot of reality television, true crime television, and even documentaries are able to do. There’s a version of this movie that could have said this is right and this is wrong. Then the audience feels good, and you feel good. I was so much more interested in examining a more complex set of feelings and not have things be so binary.