The title of “Primetime,” Lance Oppenheim’s thriller about the making and unmaking of the scuzzy reality-TV phenomenon “To Catch a Predator,” tells us we’re watching a period piece. The period is 2006, when the golden age of streamable content is barely a speck on the media horizon. YouTube is less than a year old, Netflix is a DVD-by-mail service, and a prime-time slot is still one of the most coveted jewels in broadcast television. Of the many throwback jolts that “Primetime” aims to deliver, none is more jarringly analog than the sight of a TV schedule on a wall at NBCUniversal’s offices, with shows like “Gilmore Girls” and “Veronica Mars” stacked on primary-colored planks. When the network’s C.E.O., Jeff Zucker—played, in a vertiginous mix of authenticity and uncanny-valley weirdness, by Zucker himself—announces that he’s moving “To Catch a Predator” to Wednesdays at 9 P.M., he actually moves it, with his hand. Spreadsheets existed in 2006, but here they are kept, like everyone’s shame and scruples, firmly out of sight.

With “To Catch a Predator,” Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson), the show’s immaculately suited host, and Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), his formidable producer, have transformed a popular segment on the news magazine “Dateline NBC” into a skin-crawling sensation. The opening scenes of “Primetime,” which was written by Ajon Singh, set up the format of the show, which is itself an elaborate setup—a trap laid for men soliciting sex with minors. One such mark (Tony Revolori) turns up at a suburban address, expecting to find a thirteen-year-old girl he’s met online. Little does he know that the house is rigged with cameras, and that a TV crew supervised by Bender is hiding inside. He’s welcomed in by a “decoy” (Phoebe Bridgers), an adult passing for a minor, and then the trap is sprung: Hansen emerges and confronts the man with a smirk, a damning transcript of illicit chat messages, and the news that all this is being recorded for television. After some squirmy interrogation, the disgraced target is asked to leave—at which point he’s arrested outside by armed police officers, who have been working closely with the crew.

It’s a queasily compelling spectacle, though perhaps also a redundant one. Even for those of us who didn’t watch “To Catch a Predator” when it aired, from 2004 to 2007, the documentary “Predators,” which was released last year, told us more than we could have ever wanted to know. Its director, David Osit, sifting through hours of “Catch” footage and interviewing its original participants, asked tough questions about the ethics of an enterprise that presented itself as a moral crusade but was ultimately torn apart by competing imperatives: Was this a law-enforcement tool, a piece of entertainment, or both? “Predators” was thoughtful and productively disturbing, at least until its posturing final moments, when Osit, interrogating a proudly unrepentant Hansen, tried to turn the show’s formal devices against him: split-screen surveillance footage, a post-interview walk of shame. It was a clever but hollow bit of visual mimicry, a halfhearted takedown that devolved into a futile shrug.

“Primetime,” as it happens, is Oppenheim’s first stab at fiction. He previously directed the documentary features “Some Kind of Heaven” (2021), a panoramic portrait of a retirement community, and “Spermworld” (2024), which explored the growing online market for sperm donations—the end and the beginning of life in two wittily framed, dryly observant films. Both were shot by David Bolen, whom Oppenheim has retained for “Primetime.” Their work here evokes the grubby, pixellated textures and the seedy-dreamy ambience of a bygone trash-TV era. The atmosphere persists even when the characters are off the air, as if to suggest that the seeping rot of the show has metastasized into every moment of their lives. The frame is squarish in shape, recalling the years before wide-screens were widespread; the colors, especially the flesh tones, are luridly oversaturated. At times, Oppenheim zooms in on his characters so intently that he seems ready to claw their faces off, the better to penetrate through to their darkest depths.

But what would he find? Pattinson’s dazzlingly contoured performance doesn’t provide any easy answers. His Chris Hansen is all flashy surface, full of jittery go-getter energy and disturbingly devoid of inner life. At NBC, he’s a second-tier golden boy, stuck in the shadow of the “Dateline” anchor Stone Phillips (Bill Heck), who’s off doing serious reporting in places like Afghanistan. (The war on terror, the film suggests, was one of the few things that could command American attention spans in the early two-thousands, along with Britney Spears and reality TV.) Meanwhile, Hansen’s work has taken a toll on his family life in Stamford, Connecticut, where he occasionally drops in on his wife (Anna Faris) and their two young sons. Then it’s back on the road to sniff out sex offenders in towns like Fort Myers, Florida, where one of Hansen’s extramarital affairs has attracted the notice of the National Enquirer. The irony of America’s most famous entrapment artist facing his own public humiliation is not lost on him.

Challenged on all sides, Hansen finds that his only recourse is to throw himself, with ever more frenzied self-seriousness, into his work. Sitting down with Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo), a naïve yet ambitious twenty-three-year-old who’s been cast as a decoy, Hansen denies that what they’re doing has any relation to acting; they’re in the truthtelling business. His own behavior belies that notion. Preparing to make his “gotcha!” entrance, Hansen rehearses the incriminating chat messages that he plans to read: “I will undress you, and you will undress me,” he murmurs, and Pattinson, magnificently repellent, draws out the juicy salaciousness in every word. If you saw the actor’s dual performances in “Mickey 17” (2025), you know that his single most chameleonic attribute is his voice, which he can inflect and distort with virtuosic skill. No less slippery are his matinée-idol looks, which can turn wolfish or ratty on a dime, as if his beauty were moldering away from within. Again and again, Pattinson evinces a pig-in-shit delight in his characters’ rough edges, frayed nerves, and devious motives—not that Hansen would ever admit to the last, convinced as he is of the nobility of his cause. “We are cleansing the world of an ancient evil,” he declares.

His colleagues are not so high-minded, and as pressures and budgets mount—more episodes, fresh locations, higher-profile targets—the film becomes a vision of something strikingly relatable: the low-morale workplace. When Bender considers moving to a rival network, Wever fleshes out the tough carapace of a woman who, even under the thorniest of circumstances, never stops calculating her next move. “Decoy Dan,” as Hansen christens him, just wants to be an actor, and Gisondo shows the layers of the young man’s confusion, vulnerability, and desperation as he realizes how limited his opportunities are. The team’s creepiest and most contented member is Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher), an online vigilante who arranges the show’s meetups, spending his days and nights fishing around in online chat rooms.

And what of the fish? Like “Predators,” “Primetime” allows us to feel a twinge of pity on their behalf. One target has a disability; another turns out to be a rabbi, who responds to his confrontation with suitably Talmudic indignation. Singh’s script climaxes with the fatal 2006 incident that ultimately took “To Catch a Predator” off the air—a would-be predator’s suicide, triggered by the zealous overreach of the show’s camera crew and the police. But the film’s depiction of the tragedy feels cynical and rote, and one shot in particular, all meticulously art-directed blood spatter, throws the aesthetic virtues and dramatic limitations of “Primetime” into sharp relief. Oppenheim has persuasively rendered a grotesque phenomenon, but his curiosity seems to stop at how everyone and everything looked. There’s no deeper analytical heft to the movie, no larger curiosity about what “To Catch a Predator” meant then or what it might mean now, especially in the wake of the sex-trafficking conspiracy theories of QAnon and the very real, still emerging horrors of the Epstein files.

Hansen, who left NBC in 2013 but remains a leader in the pervert-ambushing space, has spoken about having considered a sting operation against Jeffrey Epstein in 2015. The men he exposed are small-timers by comparison, although Oppenheim has cast them with a nasty, stunt-like relish, starting with Revolori, who came to fame as a fresh-faced young bellhop in “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014). Another offender is played by Jonathan Lipnicki, whom some will remember as the cherubic kid from “Jerry Maguire” (1996), and who here has graduated to doing unspeakable things with whipped cream. The most tortured of the lot comes to us in the form of Alex Winter, now all but unrecognizable as the youthful co-lead of “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” (1989). By the time you do recognize him, you may let out a grim chuckle at what I can only assume is Oppenheim’s expression of sympathy for the Devil—a reminder, if we needed it, that every child predator was once a child, too. ♦