‘This goes way beyond Chris Hansen’: How Primetime’s Lance Oppenheim turned the tables on trash TV

‘This goes way beyond Chris Hansen’: How Primetime’s Lance Oppenheim turned the tables on trash TV BARRY HERTZ PUBLISHED 54 MINUTES AGO UPDATED 26 MINUTES AGO Open this photo in gallery: Oppenheim, doesn't feel as if as if Primetime should be regarded as some kind of straight-ahead Hansen biopic, but instead an aim to document a single turning point in the arc of a culture that is as old as time itself. SINNA NASSERI/SUPPLIED COMMENTS SHARE SAVE FOR LATER Listen to this article Learn more about audio Log in or create a free account to listen to this article. Lance Oppenheim sees how this looks – he understands his obsession about another man’s obsession has itself inspired a film about, well, obsession. He’s the director behind the incendiary new satire-cum-thriller Primetime, which dramatizes the rise and fall of NBC’s controversial early-aughts To Catch a Predator reality series, in which journalist Chris Hansen ensnared men who thought they were meeting underage teens for sex. So, the filmmaker intimately knows the ins and outs of that particular era of trash TV. Heck, the 30-year-old Oppenheim practically grew up inside its toxic circus, in which Hansen was the de facto ringleader. “It’s funny, as a kid I grew up watching South Park and Mad TV and a lot of sketch comedy, and I saw so many episodes of these programs satirizing To Catch a Predator, and there was something almost mythological about Chris Hansen. He almost had these superpowers,” recalls Oppenheim ahead of Primetime’s release this weekend. “He could compel anybody to come inside the kitchen where the crew was set up, have a seat, grab a slice of pizza or munch on a cookie as he would then dismantle their lives on television.” There was something about Hansen’s approach to nabbing so-called predators – the anchor was confrontational but polished – that struck the young Oppenheim as theatrical, a heightened kind of performance that hurdled past even the lowest depths of “gotcha” journalism. Yet it would take the budding filmmaker a few more years to fully process the phenomenon unfolding in front of his eyes. Review: Primetime’s Robert Pattinson delivers the performance of the year in sharp, sickening media satire “I don’t think I really understood what I was watching as a kid. Was it like a prank show? It reminded me of MTV’s Cribs or Punk’d,” Oppenheim says. “Everything that Hansen was doing inside of it, it felt so carnivalesque.” Eventually, as Oppenheim began making…