The discourse around Primetime has frankly become exhausting, and it is entirely the fault of the man the movie is ostensibly about. Yesterday, I was having an oat milk cortado with a prominent dialect coach in Los Feliz when the alert from the trades hit my phone: Chris Hansen, the former host of To Catch a Predator, had taken to his podcast to give the new Robert Pattinson film a "D" rating. His central grievance? That the movie is 98 percent pure fiction, and that Pattinson’s portrayal of him is "so detached, so unhinged, so dark, so unlikable."
To which I, and anyone who understands the fundamental purpose of cinema, must ask: Yes, Chris, and your point is what, exactly?
We are in the thick of awards season, a delicate time when studios are carefully managing the rollout of their prestige contenders. The last thing anyone needs is the actual subject of a psychological thriller emerging from the depths of podcasting to aggressively fact-check a masterpiece of mood and tension. Hansen seems to believe that a major motion picture exists to serve as a documentary record of his time standing in suburban kitchens holding a clipboard. He is tragically mistaken.
Pattinson’s performance is a revelation precisely because he abandons the mundane reality of basic cable journalism in favor of a brooding, existential dread. When Pattinson stares dead-eyed at a plate of stale brownies for four uninterrupted minutes of screen time, vibrating with the suppressed rage of a man entirely alienated from his own humanity, we are watching high art. Hansen is complaining that he personally never did that. But he should have.
Hollywood did not cast one of the most compelling actors of his generation to play a perfectly pleasant man who calmly asks people to take a seat. They cast him to play a fractured psyche spiraling into the abyss. If Hansen wants to be remembered as a well-adjusted professional, he can release his own archival tapes. But if he wants to be remembered as a cultural icon, he needs to step aside and let Pattinson do the heavy lifting.
If subjects want one hundred percent factual accuracy, they should invest in a chest-mounted GoPro, not hand their life rights to a prestige production company looking for a fourth-quarter awards contender.
The sheer ingratitude on display here is staggering. For decades, Hansen was trapped in the aesthetic confines of early-2000s syndicated television programming—sensible sweaters, harsh fluorescent lighting, and the pedestrian cadence of a local news anchor. Primetime has retroactively gifted him with razor-sharp cheekbones, a wardrobe entirely sourced from obscure Belgian designers, and a deeply cinematic aura of moral ambiguity. The film implies that Hansen himself is a monster staring into the abyss of other monsters, a thematic resonance that elevated him from a television host to a tragic antihero.
Instead of sending Pattinson a thank-you note and a basket of artisanal muffins, Hansen is complaining on a podcast called "Have a Seat" that the script takes liberties. He is specifically annoyed by the third act, wherein Pattinson’s character locks himself in a decoy house bathroom and hallucinates a conversation with a giant, anthropomorphic pitcher of iced tea. Is it "pure fiction," as Hansen claims? Perhaps literally. But emotionally, it is the truest scene in the film.
We actually focus-grouped a version of the script where the host was a well-adjusted, likable journalist, and test audiences universally wrote in the margins that they wanted him to slowly lose his grip on reality while monologuing at a plate of store-bought cookies.
This is the problem with the democratization of media. Anyone can just turn on a microphone and contradict a forty-million-dollar production. We saw this exact same entitlement when The Social Network came out, with real people constantly whining that they were portrayed as backstabbing villains just because a screenwriter thought it made for a snappier second act. Subjects of biopics need to understand their place in the ecosystem. They provide the raw, unpolished, often incredibly boring ore; Hollywood refines it into gold.
As the press tour for Primetime moves toward the major festivals, I sincerely hope Hansen’s representatives advise him to change his tune. The unhinged, unlikable sociopath currently playing in theaters nationwide is the absolute best version of Chris Hansen that will ever exist. It is time for him to accept his own advice, have a seat, and let Robert Pattinson win the Golden Globe in peace.