Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime has put Chris Hansen and the Rockwall County, Texas case that helped end To Catch A Predator back in the spotlight. The film is being framed around the moment the television experiment collided with real death, and that is the story people are now searching for.
That matters because To Catch A Predator was not some minor curiosity. It ran for three years, used volunteer groups and local law enforcement agencies to draw in adult men who sought to meet underage people for sex, and turned Hansen into a familiar face on NBC. In Primetime, Robert Pattinson plays him after first coming to the show while staying in the United States to film the Twilight series, a casting choice that makes the project feel even stranger than the subject itself.
The Rockwall County episode is the part that still gives the story its weight. Bill Conradt, the Rockwall County, Texas Assistant District Attorney targeted by the show, allegedly attempted to meet and have sex with a juvenile. He shot himself in the head as police began to breach his Rockwall County residence. That death became the decisive break in the show’s public reputation, and his family later brought a $100 million wrongful death lawsuit against NBC that was settled in 2008 for an undisclosed amount.
Primetime does not treat that history as a clean triumph. The film is described as extremely critical of the series that some viewers once saw as morally righteous, and it pushes against the idea that the show’s public purpose excused the damage around it. Oppenheim has said a Cameo video from Hansen that his wife gave him in 2024 helped lead him into the project, and two weeks after he showed Pattinson that video, Pattinson’s producing partner sent him the script by Ajon Singh. Pattinson initially signed on to Primetime as a producer before deciding to play Hansen, which suggests the role was not just a performance choice but part of the film’s larger obsession with how fame is manufactured.
Oppenheim has called Singh’s script something closer to a fever dream than a conventional biopic, and that is the right frame for a movie that wants to follow a host chasing television glory all the way to the moment the story breaks apart. The unanswered question is not whether Primetime revisits the Texas case; it clearly does. It is whether the film’s darkest scenes will be the ones viewers remember most.
