Blurred lines of TV bait and its price

Doc examines tactics of the show 'To Catch a Predator' that may have gone too far.

- AMY NICHOLSON

THE DOCUMENTARY "Predators" turns a lens on the Dateline NBC program "To Catch a Predator."

MTV Documentary Films

It took just 20 episodes for the Dateline NBC program "To Catch a Predator" 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's houses, welcomed inside by a young-looking actor and then surprised — and publicly grilled — by news anchor Chris Hansen, who had already won two Emmys for a piece on sexual trafficking in Cambodia.

"So what are you up to tonight?" 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's tragicomic rim shot, a perpetrator's few seconds of naive relief between when Hansen said they were free to go and police officers tackled them outside.

David Osit's absorbing documentary "Predators" turns that investigative lens on the show itself. Tonally, this steady and powerful film is everything the original program wasn't: hesitant, sorrowful and compassionate for every human being onscreen. Strikingly unaccusatory, perhaps because the television phenomenon itself had already passed judgment, Osit's reexamination never makes the case that these men are innocent, although it's also aware that the longer we watch behind-thescenes reels of them, the more empathy we'll have, albeit confounding and conflicted.