Watched Predators on Paramount

I tried to watch it but had to turn it off when they played the audio from a call to a 13 year old. Absolutely sickening.

I watched this doc almost in reverse.

I walked in as my wife was watching the ending, which was so surreal, that I went back to see if the entire documentary was this odd.

Spoilers: Because I doubt that many will watch this.

It's broken up into three parts, with the first portion being about the actual Dateline series. I never watched the original because it seemed very formulaic. I guess the draw was to see how the different predators reacted? The Dateline focus was pretty by the book. They create a best-of reel, interview the prosecutors who were for it, and the prosecutors who were against it (some prosecutors damned the show for the TV "arrests" making the cases "unprosecutable"). They also go into the case where the suspect never went to the bait house and instead of one or two cops knocking on his door, they showed up with a ton of cops and a camera crew, tipping off the guy and resulting in his suicide in front of the cops. They show a lot of behind the scenes footage in an attempt to show the human side of the predators. You don't find out why the documentarian is doing this until the end of the show. They also interview the bait girls and bait boy. As you'd expect, it was a creepy job for a young actor to have. They have good to mixed feelings now, but I didn't see regret except for the guy whose predator killed himself.

The second portion is about the copycat "To Catch a Predator" YouTubers. Which is fricked up and sad, because there's no longer a law enforcement element and no rationalization that this is for anything but money and clicks. Guys luring predators into WalMarts so they can chase them and scream at them like it's a joke, another guy calling himself Skeet Hansen who does a Motel 6 version of Dateline, then tells the predator that he's calling the Sheriff on him. The second part drags out, then you get to the even weirder third part.

They end the show by interviewing Chris Hansen himself. Hansen has ended up as a YouTube version of his famous Dateline self. He's still catching predators, but the doc makes sure you see that he's lost his sheen. They get on him about his recent misstep where he caught an 18 year old high school senior agreeing to meet with a "15 year old Freshman/Sophomore" The judge agrees to purge everything if the 18 year old stays out of trouble, but the defendant isn't allowed around anyone 17 or under, so he has to leave school and is now a sex offender. Hanson is on camera noting that different states have different laws about 18 year olds dating 15 year olds, but goes ahead with the segment. He later pulls the segment from the internet, and says that eventually the kid's story will stop appearing on Google searches. On the other hand they go into how Hansen made his bones, before TCAP he flew to Asia to document human trafficking, and followed an American to his Asian home and busted him for bragging about his exploits. That was the first I'd seen of Hansen's early work.

It ends with the documentarian pressing Hansen in his interview, drawing it out, then revealing that he was abused as a child by a predator. He watched Hansen's show waiting to find out why the predators did it, but never got an answer from the series. You get longer and longer takes of the interviewer just sitting there, Hansen getting up and leaving, and remote cameras following Hansen as he leaves the building, like he's one of the predators from Dateline. Then the documentarian just sitting there, and sitting there... bizarre. I've seen documentarians turn the subject matter back to themselves, but never at this level.