How ‘To Catch a Predator’ indulged America’s appetite for humiliation and punishment

For a television show that was canceled nearly two decades ago, “To Catch a Predator” has been having quite a moment.

For years, the show entertained Americans by finding men seeking sex with minors in online chatrooms and luring them into decoy houses. The host, “Dateline NBC” correspondent Chris Hansen, would then confront the men on camera.

Now a fictional account of the show, “Primetime,” will arrive in movie theaters in late September 2026, starring Robert Pattinson as Hansen. It comes on the heels of “Predators,” a critically acclaimed 2025 documentary about the legacy of “To Catch a Predator.”

As scholars of American culture and criminology, we’ve researched and written about the popularity of “To Catch a Predator” and its spinoff programs “Hansen vs. Predators” and “Takedown with Chris Hansen.” To us, these shows are part of a broader legacy of Americans’ cultural attachment to vigilantism: the belief that when the government fails to root out threats to society, ordinary people should step up and punish wrongdoers.

There was something about “To Catch a Predator” that took this genre of entertainment to new heights. Yes, there was the novelty of having the ultimate pariah – the pedophile – at its center. But there was also the ritual of humiliation and punishment that it celebrated, one that has since rippled across politics, social media and popular culture.

The vigilante tradition in American culture

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, vigilantism was closely associated with anti-immigrant and anti-Black violence, most notoriously through lynching.

This kind of lethal vigilantism has declined dramatically. But popular culture has continued to offer Americans plenty of opportunities to fantasize about the thrills of taking the law into their own hands, whether through pulp novels like Mickey Spillane’s “Mike Hammer” series, comics like “Batman,” John Ford’s westerns or Showtime’s “Dexter.”

As fear of violent crime grew over the course of the 1970s, a succession of popular films featured heroes who bypassed a supposedly ineffective legal system to defeat dangerous criminals.

In the 1971 film “Dirty Harry,” Clint Eastwood plays a police officer who goes rogue when a prosecutor refuses to bring a serial killer to justice because the incriminating evidence was illegally obtained. Using his trademark .44 Magnum revolver, Harry delivers justice for victims failed by the state. Three years later, “Death Wish” featured Charles Bronson starring as Paul Kersey, an architect who becomes a vigilante after his wife is murdered, and who goes on a killing spree of petty criminals as the police turn a blind eye.

As viewers cheered on fictional vigilantes finally “doing something” about crime, shrewd politicians harnessed their thirst for punishment. They campaigned on and passed “tough on crime” laws that packed the nation’s prisons. Government agencies increasingly enlisted the public’s vigilante impulse by encouraging neighborhood groups to surveil their communities, protect their homes with security systems and help the FBI by watching out for criminals at large on shows like “America’s Most Wanted.”

Tapping into fears of online ‘stranger danger’

When it premiered in 2004, “To Catch a Predator” tapped into a new fear: online stranger danger.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, statistically rare instances of strangers abducting white children from public spaces and murdering them became highly publicized. This helped fuel a moral panic about the vulnerability of children, particularly as mothers were increasingly working outside of the home.

The emergence of the internet generated a new kind of stranger danger: Now, online predators could reach through fiber-optic cables and groom children in their own homes.

No show did more to raise the alarm about this new form of stranger danger than “To Catch a Predator.” The show was originally a recurring segment on “Dateline NBC,” the weekly investigative television newsmagazine that had debuted in 1992.

In it, reporter Chris Hansen collaborated with a vigilante organization called Perverted Justice. The vigilantes posed as teenagers in online chat rooms, responded enthusiastically if adults oriented the conversation toward sex, and invited them to come to a suburban home. The unsuspecting targets who showed up instead found Hansen and a camera crew, who barged into the room on Hansen’s cue.

The segment proved so popular that NBC eventually gave Hansen his own show.

Free from any pretense of serious investigative journalism, “To Catch a Predator” became a form of “humilitainment” – programming that exposes and degrades deviant people for the pleasure of its audience. As crews surround the suspects with cameras they hold like weapons, panic washes over them as they are being publicly branded a sex offender. Indeed, the label of “child sex predator” is so toxic that these scenes amounted to a kind of social death.

By watching the scene through those cameras, viewers don’t just get to witness the punishment.

In some sense, they get to participate in it.

Humiliation and punishment

“Predators,” the documentary about the show, captures the dangerous consequences of merging crime control with humilitainment.

It details how, in 2006, the show tried – and failed – to lure a Texas prosecutor named William Conradt Jr. to its bait house. Producers subsequently pressured local police to attempt to arrest him. As the “Dateline” crew and police surrounded the house, Conradt died by suicide.

More recently, in a 2023 episode of the “To Catch a Predator” spinoff “Takedown,” Hansen netted an 18-year-old gay man in Michigan who thought he was meeting up with a 15-year-old boy. Michigan is one of a handful of states that does not grant an 18-year-old a general close-in-age exemption for attempting to have sex with a 15-year-old. This provision of the law eliminates or reduces criminal penalties for consensual sexual activity when the participants are close in age and one partner is below the legal age of consent.

A producer had urged Hansen not to air the segment, but he did anyway, destroying the young man’s reputation in his first year of adulthood. The documentary includes an interview with the young man’s mother while he can be heard sobbing off camera.

In our view, “Primetime” and “Predators” should not be understood as a sign that Americans are rethinking their embrace of vigilantism and humilitainment.

Amateur humiliation content has become widespread on the internet, giving Americans more opportunities than ever to indulge in gleeful disgust or righteous outrage. “Karen” and “internet freakout” videos expose people behaving rudely in public, while “gym shaming” videos mock poor workout form. Ring camera footage can capture homeowners confronting porch thieves or political canvassers.

For its part, “To Catch a Predator” lives on in everything from copycat sting shows to parodies, to Hansen-produced revivals. On platforms such as X and TikTok, videos made by Dads Against Predators circulate, often depicting violent assaults of men who showed up somewhere to meet a minor for sex.

The short videos rewrite the final moment of “To Catch a Predator,” in which Hansen calmly confronts and sternly chastises the would-be predator, before letting law enforcement take over.

Instead, the vigilantes in Dads Against Predators simply punch their targets in the face.