Why Did We Ever Watch ‘To Catch a Predator’?

The year 2004, situated after 9/11 and before the election of Barack Obama, might have been the one that best summed up the excesses and cruelties of the George W. Bush era, particularly on television: The Apprentice , Nipplegate , 60 Minutes ’ report on atrocities at Abu Ghraib , The Swan . The overarching theme was exposure, followed by ensuing cycles of shame, recrimination, and (often) profit. Reality TV, having cycled through its anthropological social-experiment phase , was now balls-to-the-wall invested in spectacle—the more lurid and indefensible, the better. In March 2004, MTV debuted I Want a Famous Face , a reality show that featured people having extreme plastic surgery to look more like their favorite celebrities. Late in the year, on Dateline NBC , the debonair investigative journalist Chris Hansen premiered a new series of special reports targeting adult men who were trying to have sex with underage teenagers they’d met on the internet. To Catch a Predator ran for three years, and its unique selling point seemed to be that it was, as Jimmy Kimmel once jokingly referred to it, “ Punk’d for pedophiles.” The series touted its noble intentions—identifying and exposing people who might prey on children—but the format of the show clarified that its main focus was entertainment. Unwitting men who’d chatted online with adults pretending to be children would be invited to a house rigged with cameras, where actors (“decoys,” in the show’s parlance) who were over 18 but looked younger would welcome them in, chat chirpily in Mickey Mouse helium voices, and then disappear so that Hansen could take over. “How are you?” he’d ask in a faux-friendly tone, before revealing the cameras, the chat logs, the scale of their reprobation. To Catch a Predator was, essentially, a prank show with a monstrous twist, Candid Camera with the prospect of prison time and a spot on the sex-offender registry. “When a TV show makes you feel sorry for potential child rapists, you know it’s doing something wrong,” Charlie Brooker argued in The Guardian in 2008. (A few years later, possibly in response to the NBC show, he wrote one of the darkest episodes of Black Mirror , in which a cheery host tortures and humiliates a woman accused of child predation while audiences cheer.) Predators , a documentary by David Osit recently released on Paramount+, homes in on that feeling of reluctant empathy, where we’re forced to confront multiple truths at once: Yes, To Catch a Predator was targeting men who were trying to doing something monstrous; yes, the show was raising awareness about the grooming of children online; yes, it was also doing so in a way that turned personal transgression into public drama, appealing to our basest desires to see people disgraced, from the comfort of our couch. By 2004, this kind of “humilitainment”—a term that the law professor Amy Adler devised to describe the fetishization of punishment on camera exemplified by Abu Ghraib—wasn’t just “the master narrative of reality TV,”...

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