---
title: "Primetime (2026) review"
description: "Robert Pattinson's 2026 has been one long argument that he's the best creep in Hollywood"
url: https://www.joekarlsson.com/reviews/primetime-2026/
---

![A still from Primetime (2026)](https://www.joekarlsson.com/images/reviews/primetime-2026/backdrop.webp)

# Primetime (2026)

Oct 1, 2026 | 2 min read | Rated 3.5 out of 5 | Dir. Lance Oppenheim

Robert Pattinson’s 2026 has been one long argument that he’s the best creep in Hollywood

Lance Oppenheim has made a career out of filming people who live inside a fantasy they built for themselves, from the retirees of The Villages in Some Kind of Heaven to the donors of Spermworld. Primetime is his first narrative feature, and it arrives the same month as You Can See Everything, his Elizabeth Holmes documentary with Nathan Fielder. Together they make a strange little double feature about hapless, power-hungry people who want money and influence and will lie to anyone standing between them and it. Oppenheim seems fixated right now on the point where a performance eats the person giving it.

Robert Pattinson makes that point visible.

He plays the concept of Chris Hansen more than the man: a guy who assembled an identity out of a catchphrase and a staged kitchen, then got so lost in it that there was nobody left underneath. Pattinson is the best actor alive at creepy, pathetic, unhinged weirdos, and he is having a legendary 2026. The highlight, for me, is a moment where he slowly levels a finger gun and silently mouths the word “cock.” I loved it.

I’ve seen people online say this movie goes easy on pedophiles, and I think they have it backwards. Primetime is doing two things, and neither of them is excusing anyone. The first is showing that Hansen and the To Catch a Predator crew were predators too: they baited men into staged houses, humiliated them on camera, and sold it as public service, and the film puts the cost of that on screen when Bill Conradt shoots himself rather than walk into Hansen’s frame. Men who commit the worst crimes there are still don’t deserve to die for a ratings bump. The second thing is quieter and, I think, more damning. Hansen’s whole show runs on the idea that these men are timeless demons who need to be dragged into the light and purged. The men who actually walk through his door are lonely, pathetic, deeply broken guys. They’re neighbors. They’re people who have sat at our tables and met our families. The show never purged anything, and Oppenheim makes sure you feel that; even after Conradt’s death, something is still sitting out in the dark, watching Hansen from a distance.

This film also looks incredible. Cinematographer David Bolen shot it on more than a dozen cameras across roughly ten formats, including mini-DV, old tube broadcast cameras, and a colonoscopy endoscope, then printed the whole thing to 16mm. The Tuscan palette, the pinks, the glow of CRT televisions, the fake sets with those weird bars running through the middle of the room: it captures 2006 better than anything I’ve seen try.

Primetime doesn’t give Hansen an ending after the big catch, and it shouldn’t. He never learned anything. He’s still doing the bit on YouTube twenty years later.

Whatever creep Pattinson plays next, I’ll be there.

Also on [Letterboxd](https://letterboxd.com/joekarlsson/film/primetime-2026/)

## Works on My Machine

Get the next post by email. My newsletter covers homelab builds, AI tools and open source, and it goes out when I have something to say.

It's free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. You'll get an email to confirm first.

![Joe Karlsson at his desk, chin on hand, with a microphone in front of him](https://www.joekarlsson.com/images/about/collage/studio.webp)

Joe  
Karlsson

I write about my homelab, AI tools, databases, and the weird stuff I build on the side.

[More about me →](https://www.joekarlsson.com/about/)

[Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/joekarlsson.com) | [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/joekarlsson/) | [GitHub](https://github.com/JoeKarlsson)