Even pop culture phenomenon’s can bring up some morally questionable moments in the name of doing a public service…

Predators throws us head first into the world of a TV show that was doing actual good, but in so many wrong ways until it all came to an end which unintentionally gave birth to something that dominates the modern pop culture zeitgeist today.

To Catch a Predator was a popular television show designed to hunt down child predators and lure them to a film set, where they would be interviewed and eventually arrested. An exploration of the scintillating rise and staggering fall of the show and the world it helped create.

It only last 20 episodes, but To Catch a Predator arguably gave birth to the “True Crime” genre of docu-tainment that we consume today and what director David Osit does here with Predators is pretty masterful.  It acknowledges the psychology of why we enjoy this as entertainment, it grapples with the morality of this form of story telling and it asks all the right questions as we as a society head down this rabbit hole wondering if the value it gives is worth the question if we should be doing any of this in the first place.

Osit has crafted a dark spin on the media landscape that makes us alert in ways that we as an audience probably won’t expect.  Our thirst for justice as entertainment can easily get skewed as basic human decency can go out the door for the sake of eye balls on the product.

What Predators wants us to ask is something that needs to be more at the forefront these days in a media landscape that is filled with so-called ‘fake news’, artificial intelligence based stories designed to confuse the masses.

Do the means justify the ends?  Sure this show (and subsequent vigilante spinoffs that have come from the original show), have and do help to get sexual predators out of the shadows and exposed to the public, but there’s also a narrow window in which these people can actually be charged with a crime either.  The whole ideas behind these shows is basically a form of entrapment and that’s a real problem that we’ve collectively been willing to overlook for the sake of being entertained by other people’s human misery.  Ultimately in a world of cancel culture and 24 hr news, the line between both sides of that morality aisle can get a little blurry.

Ultimately, if you’re the kind of person who wants answers from their documentaries, Predators might not be for you, because this film is all about asking genuine questions as we head forward into the ever evolving forms of media and entertainment.  David Osit acknowledges that we’re all elbows deep into shades of grey world as puts the mirror back on us wondering if we should actually keep going or if we should hit the pause button, find a way to be kinder to one another and not embraces the horrors that are in our very midst for the sake of moral superiority in the guise of entertainment.

It’s not about the media or the content that’s being produced but rather in how we consume it and how it can be harmful if something goes down the wrong pipe.