Chris Knipp
09-19-2025, 01:58 PM
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/%20preda.jpg
SHOOTING THE CLIMAX OF AN EPISODE OF "TO CATCH A PREDATOR"
DAVID OSIT: PREDATORS (2025)
The law as entertainment is a bad idea, but "To Catch a Predator" has had some positive effects
"Some people watching this may feel like you have something to answer for - that this genre of TV you've helped make doesn't deter criminals, or get to the bottom of their crimes, it just helps us enjoy it." This from the filmmaker David Osit occurs in an interview with Chris Hansen today in the last ten minutes of the documentary about "To Catch a Predator," Hansen's TV series that ran from 2004 to 2007 on NBC’s Dateline franchise, but whose effect and currency, we learn, has extended much longer than that. The series has been cloned and it and its clone have a vast audience on YouTube today.
There is prurient or morbid curiosity and dubious ethics behind these shows, this show that kept Chris Hansen in business long after the original show's run. The subjects, the "predators" are adults, only males as far as is shown, who seek out underage males or females for sex (or very often more likely suggestive talk), and who are creepy or unsavory or sick: when caught in excerpts here from the show they themselves often plead that they desperately need help. But as Osit points out in this interview, while the emcee Chris Hansen confronts the would-be perpetrator in the show's climactic moment he always says "Help me to understand" and seems to want to know why those followed, recorded, confronted with cameras and transcripts at the end sought out the young, in fact the show provides no insight into this question. It is morbid curiosity that is satisfied, not a desire for understanding, which might lead us instead to books on psychology. .
So the trouble is that while Osit informs us about this show and its offshoots and their history, it may make you feel creepy or sleazy also to watch his documentary. His intent is not prurient, but the material is. He reports incidentally that he himself is a survivor of child sex abuse. Seeing predators apprehended in the show might satisfy victims, or at least Osit says it did him. However this doesn't warm me to him or his task, especially when I think of one woman who was such a victim, she reports, and who now distorts her voice to sound childlike in order to entrap potential predators as an ongoing activity, seeming to relish it, and is not an appealing character at all. She has turned into a predator of predators.
This whole film is about entrapment, first the predators' entrapment of their potential victims, then police entrapment of predators, or TV crews' entrapment of them with the help of police, or vice versa. We learn that these cases cannot be prosecuted, due to the way the arrests have been made.
Presumably all this is good to know. But as I've suggested, if turning deviant sexual behavior into television entertainment is sleazy, making a documentary about that activity is in danger of winding up feeling sleazy also. Surely watching shows like "To Catch a Predator" must be a guilty pleasure for TV fans. LIkewise with similar, related shows like "Cops. " Entrapped would-be predators sometimes turn out to be watchers of the show, but also victims, showing it may help perpetrate such activities but also heal those harmed by them. Some things may be better not shown on television. This is part of why in his Hollywood Reporter review (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/predators-review-doc-examines-to-catch-a-predator-1236118042/) David Feinberg calls Osit's fllm "complicated." "To Catch a Predator" was taken off the air after three years when a predator committed suicide at the time of capture (though it runs on in other forms). "Cops" was taken off in 2020 due to protests over racial injustice and police violence. "To Catch a Predator" also entrapped an 18-year-old high school senior for involvement with a 15-year-old. His life was shattered because even though the segment on him wound up not being shown and his mother reports trying to shield him, the segment came online and stays there "permanently," Osit says to Hansen. "For now," says Hensen, a true believer in his work forever. "To Catch a Predator" was unethical; its subsequent clones even more so and far cruder as well. It shattered lives, rather than providing a pathway to help, but some people think it was and is a good thing.
We should be able to agree that law enforcement ought not to be entertainment - or journalism; "To Catch a Predator" made it both. To think of it as such is the stuff of the tabloids of yore, the very lowest level of journalism.
The film relies on an ethnographer's comments much of the way, as Feinberg's review puts it, "to simply say the things the filmmaker needs said," but then as he gradually becomes dissatisfied with the feedback he's getting, injects himself as a voiceover. Feinberg wishes for more in the film about recidivism or treatment. But this film is about the show. The film makes its best comment with its title: the show was about predators, but was itself one. This film, with its running interview with "Predator" predator Chris Hansen, mimics the show at its end in a witty way. Is this film satisfying? I don't know. But it has satisfied some prominent critics. Victims were satisfied by the show. The filmmaker tells us, and Hansen, that, and Hansen replies that the show was always made for them. It was not made for me: it seems insufficiently concerned about ethical issues, and it doesn't sufficiently get inside anybody's head, either perpetrator or victim.
Predators, 96 mins., is an MTV Documentary Film that debuted at Sundance Jan. 25, 2025, and shown subsequently at numerous other festivals, many of them documentary ones. Opens SEPT. 19, 2025 Film Forum NYC; Sept. 26 SF Bat Area, several screenings with Q&A with the director. Metacritic (https://www.metacritic.com/movie/predators-2025/): 83%.
SHOOTING THE CLIMAX OF AN EPISODE OF "TO CATCH A PREDATOR"
DAVID OSIT: PREDATORS (2025)
The law as entertainment is a bad idea, but "To Catch a Predator" has had some positive effects
"Some people watching this may feel like you have something to answer for - that this genre of TV you've helped make doesn't deter criminals, or get to the bottom of their crimes, it just helps us enjoy it." This from the filmmaker David Osit occurs in an interview with Chris Hansen today in the last ten minutes of the documentary about "To Catch a Predator," Hansen's TV series that ran from 2004 to 2007 on NBC’s Dateline franchise, but whose effect and currency, we learn, has extended much longer than that. The series has been cloned and it and its clone have a vast audience on YouTube today.
There is prurient or morbid curiosity and dubious ethics behind these shows, this show that kept Chris Hansen in business long after the original show's run. The subjects, the "predators" are adults, only males as far as is shown, who seek out underage males or females for sex (or very often more likely suggestive talk), and who are creepy or unsavory or sick: when caught in excerpts here from the show they themselves often plead that they desperately need help. But as Osit points out in this interview, while the emcee Chris Hansen confronts the would-be perpetrator in the show's climactic moment he always says "Help me to understand" and seems to want to know why those followed, recorded, confronted with cameras and transcripts at the end sought out the young, in fact the show provides no insight into this question. It is morbid curiosity that is satisfied, not a desire for understanding, which might lead us instead to books on psychology. .
So the trouble is that while Osit informs us about this show and its offshoots and their history, it may make you feel creepy or sleazy also to watch his documentary. His intent is not prurient, but the material is. He reports incidentally that he himself is a survivor of child sex abuse. Seeing predators apprehended in the show might satisfy victims, or at least Osit says it did him. However this doesn't warm me to him or his task, especially when I think of one woman who was such a victim, she reports, and who now distorts her voice to sound childlike in order to entrap potential predators as an ongoing activity, seeming to relish it, and is not an appealing character at all. She has turned into a predator of predators.
This whole film is about entrapment, first the predators' entrapment of their potential victims, then police entrapment of predators, or TV crews' entrapment of them with the help of police, or vice versa. We learn that these cases cannot be prosecuted, due to the way the arrests have been made.
Presumably all this is good to know. But as I've suggested, if turning deviant sexual behavior into television entertainment is sleazy, making a documentary about that activity is in danger of winding up feeling sleazy also. Surely watching shows like "To Catch a Predator" must be a guilty pleasure for TV fans. LIkewise with similar, related shows like "Cops. " Entrapped would-be predators sometimes turn out to be watchers of the show, but also victims, showing it may help perpetrate such activities but also heal those harmed by them. Some things may be better not shown on television. This is part of why in his Hollywood Reporter review (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/predators-review-doc-examines-to-catch-a-predator-1236118042/) David Feinberg calls Osit's fllm "complicated." "To Catch a Predator" was taken off the air after three years when a predator committed suicide at the time of capture (though it runs on in other forms). "Cops" was taken off in 2020 due to protests over racial injustice and police violence. "To Catch a Predator" also entrapped an 18-year-old high school senior for involvement with a 15-year-old. His life was shattered because even though the segment on him wound up not being shown and his mother reports trying to shield him, the segment came online and stays there "permanently," Osit says to Hansen. "For now," says Hensen, a true believer in his work forever. "To Catch a Predator" was unethical; its subsequent clones even more so and far cruder as well. It shattered lives, rather than providing a pathway to help, but some people think it was and is a good thing.
We should be able to agree that law enforcement ought not to be entertainment - or journalism; "To Catch a Predator" made it both. To think of it as such is the stuff of the tabloids of yore, the very lowest level of journalism.
The film relies on an ethnographer's comments much of the way, as Feinberg's review puts it, "to simply say the things the filmmaker needs said," but then as he gradually becomes dissatisfied with the feedback he's getting, injects himself as a voiceover. Feinberg wishes for more in the film about recidivism or treatment. But this film is about the show. The film makes its best comment with its title: the show was about predators, but was itself one. This film, with its running interview with "Predator" predator Chris Hansen, mimics the show at its end in a witty way. Is this film satisfying? I don't know. But it has satisfied some prominent critics. Victims were satisfied by the show. The filmmaker tells us, and Hansen, that, and Hansen replies that the show was always made for them. It was not made for me: it seems insufficiently concerned about ethical issues, and it doesn't sufficiently get inside anybody's head, either perpetrator or victim.
Predators, 96 mins., is an MTV Documentary Film that debuted at Sundance Jan. 25, 2025, and shown subsequently at numerous other festivals, many of them documentary ones. Opens SEPT. 19, 2025 Film Forum NYC; Sept. 26 SF Bat Area, several screenings with Q&A with the director. Metacritic (https://www.metacritic.com/movie/predators-2025/): 83%.