The threat comes from the best of intentions…

Primetime is an insidious look under the hood at the genesis of ‘Newstainment’ as the quest for greatness comes at the cost of one’s very own soul.

In 2006, To Catch a Predator (Robert Pattinson) host Chris Hansen sets out to make television history.

While heavily fictionalized, Primetime takes us into the muck and the mire of what people will do to one another to get to the top with a couple of performances that just demand to be acknowledged.

Rather than trying to craft this in the style of a docu-drama or bio pic, Director Lance Oppenheim dives us head first into this world that is slathered in a thin film of filth that none of these people understand is there until it is too later.  By transposing us into a world that seemingly takes place in the shadow of hotel bars and dimly lit editing suites we never feel like we are watching things that actually happened.  It’s all so uncomfortable to watch that we actually needed a degree of disconnect as we’re watching something terrible and can’t look away but still maintain a certain degree of safety while doing it.  Much of this film plays like Rear Window for the 21^st Century before we realized this was just entrapment for entertainment which is just base and repugnant, and as a viewing audience we were lapping it up.

No one in this film, even the sympathetic characters were even remotely likeable which in many ways what makes this remarkable for Oppenheim to take on as a first narrative feature.

Pattinson dives into the sleaze of it all with an aplomb that makes this standout as not only one of the best performances of the year, but arguably of his entire career as well.  Wearing the cloak of a crusader, Pattinson actually has the moral struggle that we can imagine a real life vampire would deal with as he navigates a seedy societal underbelly that he thrives off of.  He turns Hanson into a conflicted creature navigating the razors edge of being a social acceptable member of society and a bottom feeder that elevates himself off of the worst of humanity that he subjected himself to on a nightly basis.  At no time does this character ever get ‘sparkly’ like his vampire character does in the Twilight franchise and instead he bleeds into the neon day glow of his existence that he walked himself into.

Merritt Wever was understatedly brilliant as his producing partner on the show as they both bent the lines of what’s socially acceptable for the sake of the all mighty ratings and it’s a performance from an Emmy winning actor showing us that there just might be more gold in her future.  Skyler Gisondo rounds it all out as the aspiring actor looking for the art in trying to find his way to his Screen Actors Guild card.  The film focuses on these three characters and while the entire narrative could have used a couple of other well written characters to work in this orbit, but all three leads do great work in carrying the narrative.

Ultimately, Primetime is really a fascinating character piece about those people in our orbits who are OK in exploring those various shades of grey in life that we as an audience find so entertaining but for those as the producers of these shows ultimately strips away a bit of their humanity as the lines between news and entertainment start to get pretty damn blurry.

There’s no answer either way, but Primetime isn’t afraid to ask of us if it’s all worth it.