There is a moment in every episode of the Y2K television phenomenon To Catch a Predator where something almost transcendent takes place. After an exchange of a sexual nature is made online between an adult and a decoy adult posing as a child, the adult arrives at the home of the “child”, which has been wired with cameras. There, the adult is greeted by a young-looking actor, who could easily pass for an underage child, and given the chance to incriminate themselves further. Before anything further occurs, a television host named Chris Hansen steps out from a hiding place, camera crew in tow. There is often a pause, and we watch – gripped, horrified, excited – as the ensnared adult’s life collapses in on itself in real time.
“In that moment, time stops,” says Mark de Rond, a Cambridge University ethnographer, in David Osit’s new Oscar-tipped documentary Predators. “What you’re seeing is, effectively, someone else’s life end.”
Osit, the Emmy-winning filmmaker behind Mayor (2020) — his portrait of a Palestinian politician navigating the Israeli occupation of the West Bank — has crafted a self-reflexive documentary that questions itself as much as it questions its subject. In it, he dives into the era in which To Catch a Predator was a television juggernaut, and speaks to the actors who played the decoys, many of whom are still grappling with their role in this morally dubious spectacle. “I had buried all this very deep until you guys brought it up,” one of them tells Osit in the film.
To Catch a Predator ran on the US broadcaster NBC for less than four years, ending in 2008 after one man “caught” by the show, a Texas assistant district attorney, Bill Conradt, died by suicide during production. His death was filmed by the show’s camera crew. Four more individuals “caught” by the show have died by suicide since its end. Predators probes the programme’s ethical fault lines, while simultaneously questioning whether Osit is guilty of similar impulses. “How different is what I’m trying to do from what the show did?” he asks me. “Am I trading in the same trope? And does the intention behind that trope change how you read it?”
To Catch a Predator purported to have journalistic intentions, namely to educate parents about the risks children face online, to deter would-be offenders, and to learn more about the psychologies of paedophiles. In reality, the series operated as little more than primetime spectacle, engineered for shock and schadenfreude. The stings were conducted in states where the men had already broken the law by the time they’d made sexual remarks on the internet to individuals they believed were children. The home visits, then, as well as the arrival of Chris Hansen – all pure theatre. “The show is basically a performance art piece,” Osit tells me.
The starkest illustration of this came in Hansen’s interviews with the captured men, each of which would conclude with the same line: “You’re free to leave.” It was a trick. Outside, police officers lay in wait, ready to chase, tackle or taser the men the moment they walked out – the episode’s final punchline.
The series was a ratings hit. Predators shows Hansen being feted on all the major talk shows at the time, by hosts we regard today as staunchly liberal. “It’s like Punk’d for paedophiles, it’s a great show,” raves Jimmy Kimmel. “You guys should have your own channel for this show,” Jon Stewart tells Hansen.
Were there no dissenting voices at the time? “I can remember very little, if any, criticism or controversy around the show,” Osit says. “The only journalist that I remember ever writing anything negative was Charlie Brooker.” In 2008, the Black Mirror scribe, then a columnist for The Guardian, wrote: “When a TV show makes you feel sorry for potential child-rapists, you know it’s doing something wrong.”
If To Catch a Predator failed to draw empathy from the majority of viewers at the time, Osit’s film certainly will not. Through hours of unseen footage, the director shares the emotionally fraught interludes between the “gotcha” moments: men with their heads in their hands, begging for help that the NBC series had no expertise in sharing, nor interest in providing. “To show these men as human beings, the show kind of breaks down,” De Rond says in the film.
At times, Osit’s documentary descends into such grim territory that watching it becomes a test of endurance. There is the case of an 18-year-old Michigan high school student who was arrested after speaking to a decoy he thought was a 15-year-old boy. Hansen, still flogging his predator act, featured the boy in his show’s latest iteration, which airs on the low-rent streaming service, TruBlu. Osit interviews the boy’s mother as her son begins to sob softly off-camera — his young life in ruins. I ask Osit if he was worried about the sheer emotional intensity of his film at times. “The pain that you’re feeling, if you’re watching something harrowing in this movie, is because you’re having an empathetic reaction to something,” he says matter-of-factly. “And this is a film where there are lots of people who are denying empathy to other human beings. So no, to answer your question. I never worried about giving people too much, because it’s a film about people who aren’t giving enough.”
While To Catch a Predator may have been short-lived as a TV show, its influence was far-reaching. In its second act, Predators follows some of the amateur copycats who have taken up Hansen’s mantle as self-appointed paedophile hunters. In particular, Osit shadowed Skeet Hansen – so-named after his hero – whose sting operation videos frequently rack up more than five million views on YouTube. In one excruciating scene, Skeet and his team of rookies apprehend a would-be predator at a motel, only for the police to tell them they don’t have the resources to send anyone right away. Osit forces the audience to bask in the misery with him. Skeet dolefully delivers his catchphrase to the suicidal man – “you’ve just been Skeeted” – and waits hours for the cops (who proceed to let the man go). “It felt like days,” the director says of the experience.
For Osit, it was the discomfort of realising that as far as the man in the motel was concerned, there was no difference between him and Skeet – they were just two separate cameras in a room. “I found that so interesting and fraught and complex that I felt like the film had to show that to people,” he says. “Whether they’re documentaries with a purported higher purpose to be instigating a liberal investigation, versus a show that’s set up to derive entertainment from someone’s worst day… in that moment, they’ve merged.”
About an hour into the film, Osit does something that reframes the entire documentary. He reveals to De Rond that he himself was a victim of child abuse. It’s something he tells me came up “organically”, and once it did, he realised he couldn’t take it out of the film. “Knowing that about the film’s creator gives [it] a purpose that many documentaries pretend they don’t need to have,” he says. “We have documentaries that just kind of exist to give you the left-wing ideology of something, or to beat a drum of some issue, and it’s as if they’re made by God. With Predators, I wanted to give the audience an experience of what happens when something that purports to be morally elevated is, in fact, what everything is in the world: subjective.”
It’s a revelation that makes Osit’s eventual showdown with Hansen in the documentary all the more dramatic. “I set up this gladiator match that I didn’t even realise I wanted,” says the filmmaker. Hansen was someone who promised Osit the answers to something he’d been looking for his entire life: How could someone do that to a child? In reality, Hansen fell well short of that.
The interview ends with Osit turning Hansen’s own line back on him: “You’re free to leave.” The TV host unwittingly gets his own Predator treatment, captured on CCTV as he walks out and climbs into a waiting car. Osit asks what it means if we find that role reversal funny. “Are you finding humour from the same type of schadenfreude that you get from when he’s dismissing the man on the show? Does that mean that you also have somewhere inside of you a level of enjoyment of people’s discomfort? Are you laughing because of the sensations that we all can carry with us, which is that at the end of the day, if there’s an uncomfortable situation, we’re always going to be glad that we’re not the ones in it?”
Predators was released in the US in September, days after which Osit, curiously, appeared on Hansen’s podcast. “Because life is short,” Osit tells me about his appearance, laughing. “It felt like a full circle moment for a film that’s really reckoning with its sense of self.” It’s a fascinating interview, lighter in tone than that of the documentary but no less honest. To his credit, Hansen asks Osit bluntly: “Do you think we should keep doing these predator investigations?” The director told Hansen he didn’t think they were investigations anymore. Hansen, in his 2025 form, now relies on professional police sting operations and merely interviews the captured men afterwards. “It’s like a control experiment in the science lab,” Osit says. “If you keep taking things out, what’s left but the fact that we’re supposed to derive entertainment?”
Osit’s concerns stretch far beyond To Catch a Predator. He’s ultimately asking what happens when human pain becomes a product. “I think it always means there’s someone getting to benefit from someone else’s suffering and that is a frightening reality.” Whether Osit’s own work escapes the same dynamic is, he suggests, a question for the audience. As he tells Hansen in the series: “We make TV, we point cameras at something and the trauma continues.”
‘Predators’ is released in UK cinemas on 14 November and will be available on Paramount+ from 8 December
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