Why Did We Love “To Catch a Predator”?
In David Osit’s new documentary, “Predators,” the director includes a short clip from a mid-two-thousands episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” in which the late-night host—his free-speech tussle with the Trump Administration, at this point, not even close to a glimmer in his eye—is introducing the news journalist Chris Hansen to viewers. “Our next guest is the host of the funniest comedy on television. It’s called ‘To Catch a Predator,’ ” Kimmel says with a grin, as the studio audience’s laughter rings in the background. “If you haven’t seen it, it’s like ‘Punk’d’ for pedophiles.”
Kimmel’s characterization of Hansen’s show may have been tongue-in-cheek, but it also wasn’t off the mark. “To Catch a Predator,” which aired between 2004 and 2007 as part of the news-magazine series “Dateline NBC,” was essentially a hidden-camera prank program. Unlike Ashton Kutcher’s MTV offering, however, its subjects weren’t celebrities falling prey to practical jokery but, instead, members of the public lured into a sting house under the impression that they were about to have sex with a minor, played by an of-age but young-looking decoy whom they had been engaging with online. Once at the house, these men were confronted by Hansen and his camera crew and then arrested by local law enforcement. (The host’s recurring parting promise—“you’re free to go”—was belied by the immediate police tackling of the perpetrators as they tried to leave the premises.)
None of this might sound particularly funny, but what struck me as I watched “Predators”—a thoughtful and disturbing documentary that uses a combination of archival clips, raw footage, and talking-head interviews to examine the history and legacy of “Catch”—was the way mirth kept cropping up again and again, in and around the show. It’s there in Oprah’s excitable interaction with Hansen when she hosts him on her program; it’s there in the uproarious response of a true-crime convention audience as its members watch footage of Hansen questioning a predator; it’s even there in the barely concealed amusement of a police lieutenant as she tells Hansen that one predator, whom the camera crew was about to capture, had shot himself in the head once he came face to face with law enforcement.
The revenge impulse surely plays a part in these gleeful responses: as one woman who has served as a decoy in pedophile-sting operations tells Osit bluntly, “It is fucking funny when a bad person gets what is coming to them.” But the director’s focus on laughter also stands in for a larger critical point that he’s trying to get at. To watch “Predators” is to realize that “Catch” functioned first and foremost as entertainment, which largely mooted its other vaunted missions—to serve justice, to get to the bottom of sexual pathology, to provide solace to abuse survivors—while also flattening the essential humanity of the show’s subjects, turning troubled individuals’ actions into a quasi-pornographic exhibit meant for an audience’s voyeuristic titillation.
“Catch” was a tightly edited show that relied on recurring beats to satisfy its viewers, and one of the ways in which Osit’s documentary begins to loosen that fixed familiarity is through the inclusion of long moments of raw footage taken over the course of various shoots but left on the cutting-room floor. In these clips, we see the predators, once confronted by Hansen or, later, by law enforcement, crying, apologizing, asking for forgiveness and counselling and help—all of which the show, whose chief aim is to elevate perversion and its punishment into spectacle, is both unable and unwilling to provide them with. (“I could tell you’re a therapist,” one of the men tells Hansen, hopefully, to which the host responds, with some incredulity, “You think I’m a therapist?”) Watching these men break down is an uncomfortable experience, and Osit, himself a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, isn’t trying to claim that they are somehow good or blameless. (“I don’t think it’s justifiable,” he says, of the men’s predation.) Still, as the ethnographer Mark de Rond says of the footage, “To show these men as human beings, the show kind of breaks down. And maybe that’s why it didn’t make it on TV.”
Turning humans into fetishes to be observed rather than understood wasn’t just a characteristic of “Catch” but of popular culture more generally at the time of the show’s airing. At one point in the documentary, Osit includes an archival MSNBC clip from the conservative news show “Scarborough Country,” which, right after an interview with Hansen about “Catch,” goes on to promote an upcoming segment about Britney Spears’s mental-health battle. “Oops, she left it again!” a voice-over blares alongside videos of the singer, smiling and waving on the red carpet. “Britney’s second stint at rehab is over and done with. So, can anyone or anything convince her to get the help she so desperately needs?” Spears’s sexualization as an underage star could hardly be extricated from the later struggles that she was publicly shamed for, and, as I watched the clip, it was difficult not to think of the ways in which “Catch,” too, conveniently avoided discussing how the predators that the show uncovered didn’t entirely act alone; the culture itself was predatory.
It bears mentioning, too, that “Catch” didn’t emerge in a generic vacuum. In the early- to mid-two-thousands, reality TV was a relatively young category still finding its footing, and the era was replete with shows whose utter vulgarity pushed the medium’s envelope as far as it could possibly go. Programs such as 2004’s “The Swan,” in which a group of women underwent extensive plastic surgery to become conventionally attractive over the course of a season, or 2005’s “Who’s Your Daddy,” in which eight men competed for a payout of a hundred thousand dollars by each trying to convince an adopted woman that he was her biological father, were part of that era’s reality-TV lingua franca. Like these shows, “Catch” was characterized by a desire not just to document people’s pain but to indulge in and profit off of it.
