A 'Predators' Review

You Get Everything You Want?

One of the things that struck me in watching David Osit’s Predators (which appears is currently being review-bombed on IMDB, and is an interesting sort of commentary in and of itself) was the use of silence, both metaphorical and literal, in highlighting both themes and discrete points. Acutely, Osit made effective use of silence in interviews with subjects that allowed responses to marinate in themselves, giving permission for an emotional heft to land with the audience, or the ridiculousness of what was just said to become more and more apparent with every passing moment left unfilled. But in a broader and more metaphorical sense, the silence has much to say about the relationship between the things that disgust, the things that titillate, and our almost trademark incuriosity about them.

Predators is a 2025 documentary focused, largely, on the former NBC Show To Catch a Predator. Hosted by Chris Hansen, it had a fairly straightforward premise: they would pretend online to be a minor, and begin chatting with people online. These conversations would turn (one presumes, at the subject’s direction) sexual, and they would arrange to meet at a house wired for sound with the promise of sex. A young-looking adult would meet these people as they approached, and get them into the house before Hanson would appear from a side room, sheath of chat logs in hand, and interrogate these men (without telling them, the criminal defense attorney in me noting, that they were being recorded and about to be arrested). Hanson would then tell these men that they were “free to leave,” before they would tackled by a phalanx of armed law enforcement as soon as they exited, as they might with El Chapo.

All, of course, was filmed and broadcast. The most interesting and difficult question that Predators raises is just this: why?

TCAP went off the air in 2008, following the death-by-suicide of Texas prosecutor Bill Conradt who shot himself after a SWAT team entered his residence, dispatched with cameras in tow after he declined to follow through on the planned meeting with the TCAP decoy Conradt was talking to (the interview with whom was quite profound).

Despite Conradt’s death and the show’s cancellation, TCAP never really went away, despite having been off the air for nearly two decades now. It tapped deeply into something in the American psyche. TCAP, and Hansen himself, have become something of a cultural meme. Enterprising social media influencers—including one who has donned the identity of ‘Skeet Hansen’—ape Hansen’s whole thing. Hansen, for himself, is continuing to do pretty much the same thing on his current TruBlu show Takedown.

There are, likely, many layered reasons why TCAP et al. have such staying power. Ethnographer Mark de Rond notes that we’re essentially watching an execution — that we get to watch the moment these men’s lives end, and what’s more, they know it’s ending. A TruBlu producer interviewed for Predators postulated many ideas as to the format’s popularity, including that people like to view depravity to feel better about their own lives. Law professor Amy Adler coined the term “disavowed child pornography,” to describe TCAP: viewers get to revel in the grotesque and graphic descriptions Hansen reads from the chat logs, but to do so from a safe moral distance. It is also, at least in my view, a classic morality play: there is a clear good guy, a clear bad guy, and we (as the audience) know what side we are on.

Predators complicates that view somewhat. One of the Texas detectives Osit interviews bristled at the control that TCAP had over law enforcement operations, calling to mind the same revelation that Dan Taberski’s Running From Cops lays out with respect to the show Cops: that when you mix law enforcement and entertainment motivations, entertainment wins out. One of the subjects that Skeet Hansen confronts begs him for psychological help, to which he has little to offer other than to say he will “pull some strings,” because that’s not the business he is in.

Osit reveals his own motivations for making the film, and for interrogating TCAP, which I won’t spoil here except to say he deftly makes the observation that neither Hansen nor TCAP nor any of the Hansen-esque influencers are particularly interested in the why of the scenario. The question why would these men do this? is never really asked because the answers to that question aren’t really germane. It doesn’t matter, and as sections of Predators illustrate through unbroadcast footage from TCAP’s operations, asking that question means viewing the people they catch as just that: people, as opposed to inscrutable monsters, which makes the whole less ordeal far less entertaining. One of the decoys from TCAP that Osit interviews recalls meeting with a young man about her age, him disclosing relatable problems with college and identity, and her having the urge to simply tell him to go home, overlayed with video of the two seated on a beach talking.

If the stated purpose is to do an unqualified public good, it seems that should be the goal, or at least one of them. Instead, a cynical view might be, and one that Predators gestures towards, is that these careers are built atop that sort of willful ignorance, as if we really understood why, and the motivation were really to stop these sorts of things from happening, or even to provide healing to survivors, there might be no shows like TCAP.

That is not to say that the motivations of Skeet or Hansen himself are not genuine, only that it becomes difficult to disentangle them from the entertainment and financial motivations that are also very obviously present (which, Hansen and Skeet both disavow and distance themselves from in their airtime in Predators).

Highlighting this is a sequence late in the film where Hansen, operating under the auspices of TruBlu, ensnared an 18-year-old in one of his operations for behavior that—according to his producer—would have been legal under state law. While there may have been no conviction for the 18-year-old, Osit’s interview with his mother lays out that it was a distinction without difference given the press and clicks that it generated. When pressed about it, Hansen says that they decided to give him a second chance and take the episode offline. When Osit queries whether that makes much of a difference given that a google search of his name shows that it is permanent, Hansen’s retorts “well it’s permanent right now.”

Predators is skeptical, in a way, of something very few people have been skeptical of (and, as the review-bombing might indicate, often don’t take kindly to too many people asking too many questions). But Predators expresses its skepticism in a way that simply asks the questions that have, for twenty years, gone un-asked of this corner of entertainment and is in many ways perhaps the most basic question there is: why? Rather than provide the answers, the final moments of Predators are silent, Osit himself pondering an answer to a question.You get everything you want?