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It took just 20 episodes for the Dateline NBC program \u201cTo Catch a Predator\u201d<\/a> to leave a mark on the culture. A sting-operation-meets-hidden-camera-prank, the show had a riveting hook: Men engaging in erotic online conversations with people they thought were minors got invited over to the children\u2019s houses, welcomed inside by a young-looking actor and then surprised \u2014 and publicly grilled \u2014 by news anchor Chris Hansen<\/a>, who had already won two Emmys for a piece on sexual trafficking in Cambodia.<\/p>\n \u201cSo what are you up to tonight?\u201d Hansen might ask the would-be offenders, his demeanor crisp and casual. Some of the men tried to play cool until Hansen took out their chat transcripts; others sobbed and asked for therapeutic help. Regardless, the segments always ended the same way: the men in handcuffs, the audience riled up with moral righteousness and suspicion of their own neighbors. My roommate never missed an episode and would howl at the show\u2019s tragicomic rimshot, a perpetrator\u2019s few seconds of naive relief between when Hansen said they were free to go and police officers tackled them outside.<\/p>\n David Osit\u2019s absorbing documentary \u201cPredators\u201d turns that investigative lens on the show itself. Tonally, this steady and powerful film is everything the original program wasn\u2019t: hesitant, sorrowful and compassionate for every human being onscreen. Strikingly un-accusatory, perhaps because the television phenomenon itself had already passed judgment, Osit\u2019s reexamination never makes the case that these men are innocent, although it\u2019s also aware that the longer we watch behind-the-scenes reels of them, the more empathy we\u2019ll have, albeit confounding and conflicted.<\/p>\n Even a former Kentucky district attorney, who brags that he \u201cgot a lot of attaboys\u201d for partnering with NBC, softens his tough talk while watching outtakes of a soft-spoken and seemingly very confused arrestee. Maybe, the lawyer muses, at least that guy could have benefited from psychological counseling to become a \u201cproductive member of society.\u201d<\/p>\n Osit wants to explore what \u201cTo Catch a Predator\u201d claimed to do, what it actually did and why people liked to watch (including himself). Some of this he talks out with an ethnographer named Mark de Rond<\/a> who suggests that it\u2019s empowering to draw a line between good and evil. Yet, you get the sense that Osit\u2019s comfortable if, by the end of his film, you\u2019re even less sure of where that line is.<\/p>\n His impressive fact-finding mission includes interviews with three of the performer-decoys \u2014 two girls and a boy \u2014 who were barely adults themselves when they were hired for this high-wire, high-pressure improv gig. \u201cI had to look at it as: This is an acting job,\u201d says one. Another watches a tape of her college-freshman-aged self setting up a guy who could have been a classmate and sighs, \u201cYears later, I\u2019m still emotionally exhausted.\u201d<\/p>\n A childhood sexual abuse survivor himself, Osit also has another question: Why would anyone want to hurt a kid? Hansen\u2019s spontaneous inquisitions never turned up an answer. When Hansen sits down with this documentary for his own interrogation, Osit (who co-edited the film with Nicol\u00e1s N\u00f8rgaard Staffolani and did the cinematography) dutifully notes everything a normal TV interview tends to offer \u2014 makeup, preparation, a ride to take the subject home \u2014 as if to contrast the star\u2019s treatment with the footage that made him household-famous, or perhaps to show us how much work happens offscreen that never makes into a show\u2019s most ratings-worthy snippets.<\/p>\n Fair or not, it\u2019s a bit icky that Hansen is here framed as the sole force behind the program. \u201cTo Catch a Predator\u201d had producers, too, and they\u2019ve dodged their turn to brave the camera\u2019s scrutiny. Their absence makes Hansen\u2019s willingness to sit down for a cross-examination feel especially admirable. He continues to insist that the show helped victims. It\u2019s only when Hansen starts speaking for victims that Osit reveals his own traumatic history, an exchange that might come off as a gotcha, but I think is more complicated than that.<\/p>\n \u201cTo Catch a Predator\u201d ran for three years from 2004 to 2007 and a breakneck montage reminds us that at the peak of the show\u2019s popularity, Hansen\u2019s work was acknowledged by Oprah, \u201cThe Simpsons\u201d and Washington, D.C., back when Congress agreed that confronting such grim facts was in the country\u2019s common good. (Meanwhile in Florida, a certain pedophiliac billionaire was negotiating a plea deal.)<\/p>\n That same era has recently been under indictment for the delight in which it leered at underage celebrities. A website counted down the days until Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen<\/a> turned 18. Paparazzi laid on the sidewalk at \u201cHarry Potter\u201d star Emma Watson\u2019s<\/a> birthday party, jostling for the first publishable upskirt shots of her panties. Lindsay Lohan<\/a> marked her own transition to adulthood with a Rolling Stone cover that trumpeted: \u201cHot, Ready and Legal!\u201d Shrewdly, Osit alludes to this cultural moment with a clip of an MSNBC news broadcast transitioning from a serious segment on Hansen to making light of the mental health of Britney Spears<\/a>, whose is-she-or-isn\u2019t-she virginity status was a topic of mass discussion for years.<\/p>\n The fulcrum of the documentary is the show\u2019s most notorious episode, the one that may have ultimately gotten it canceled (although that\u2019s unclear) and the one that its decoy, a cherub-cheeked male blond, says he \u201cwouldn\u2019t film again for $10 million.\u201d The offender was a Texas assistant district attorney who ultimately shied away from coming over to meet the child. Breaking format, the TV crew drove to the man\u2019s home with the sheriff and a tactical squad. As officers broke in through the back door, the man shot himself in the head.<\/p>\n \u201cPredators\u201d has some of the raw footage of that day, although Osit doesn\u2019t use any of the material that was captured by body cameras that belonged not to the police but the producers, raising the question of who was working for whom. We stay outside on the lawn with Hansen as Osit\u2019s own cut of the segment unspools at a patient pace. He gives us plenty of time to think about what we\u2019re really watching: not must-see television, but the preamble to a funeral. I found myself furious at the lieutenant who smiles as she tells Hansen of the man\u2019s suicide. Then I realized she too might have just felt self-conscious to be on TV. Over and over again, this documentary makes the point that the screen flattens people\u2019s full humanity.<\/p>\n