Primetime: A Prurient Mix of Sexual Predators and Reality TV That Makes You Wish You Hadn’t Paid To See This Movie

October 2026

 

Watching Primetime felt like being trapped in a room...

 

With Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein...

And that wrestling coach, sexual predator, and politician...

Who just so happened to die recently... Denny Hastert

 

So this movie made me want to go home and take a shower...

Because everything about it was repellent...

From its topic... sexual predators...

To the characters who entrapped and filmed them...

 

Because before there was Keeping Up With the Kardashians...

There was To Catch a Predator...

 

The mid-aught reality show upon which this film is based...

In which the host filmed sexual predators as they came to meet their prey...

And captured their look of horror as they realized they were on live TV...

 

Primetime told me more than I wanted to know about the chat exchanges...

That led to the meetings between predator and prey...

 

And I really didn’t need to see that much male anatomy...

 

So the whole movie felt prurient...

Exploitative...

And grubby...

 

From the character...

Who seemed a little too into...

Writing the sexually explicit chats the show used to lure the predators...

And looked a bit too much like some of them....

 

To the aesthetic choices of the director, Lance Oppenheim...

 

The low lighting...

The way the movie looked like it had been filmed through a dirty window...

And the close-ups that magnified every pore and imperfection...

 

And it didn’t help that the lead, Robert Pattinson...

Who plays the ambitious TV host...

Has a face like granite... that refuses to move...

 

Only Skyler Gisondo...

Who plays the desperate actor..

Used to lure the predators...

Brought any humanity to this movie...

 

But this film is not just about sexual predators...

 

It is also about people who desperately want to be famous...

And those who prey upon them...

So everyone is manipulating someone....

 

And in a bizarre way...

Primetime manages to make you feel slightly sorry for the predators...

Which then makes you feel even worse for having watched this movie...

 

Because most of the predators in this film are sorry-looking sad men...

Desperate in their desire...

And only a few come across as truly evil...

 

Interestingly... a rabbi...

 

And no... I’m not going to try an unpack that choice...

 

But all this makes desperation the theme of Primetime...

 

That of the victims..

The predators...

And the people who set out to entrap them...

 

And if all that wasn’t bad enough...

Oppenheim ends the movie with a scene set in Texas...

 

Where the show upon which this film was based...

Crossed a line...

That led to its cancellation...

 

Because that is where they found a local politician...

 

The “whale” the host in Primetime desperately wants to bag to juice his ratings...

Who was a law and order DA....

 

But in this movie...

 

This town in Texas...

Has a police force full of idiots...

Who are proudly armed to the teeth with enough weapons to fight a war...

That they are more than happy to display on TV...

Before they climb into a massive SWAT vehicle...

That looks like a Transformer from an action movie ...

To arrest a predator...sitting in his living room...

 

Sometimes the film industry is so predictable...

In its use of tropes about flyover country...

 

But Hollywood a word... if I might....

 

You do know your kids are signing up in droves...

To go to college...

In these places...

 

So maybe they know something about that part of the country...

That you don’t...

 

Just saying...

 

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