For three years, from 2004 until 2007, the NBC Dateline program To Catch a Predator captivated American audiences with an easy, queasy morality tale of rightful comeuppance and social humiliation: undercover sting operators, including a young actor posing as an underage minor, would lure men via chatrooms and phone calls to a house under the guise of sex.
Then Chris Hansen, the equanimous and righteous host, surprised the would-be perpetrator with cameras, interviewed them and told them they were “free to go” – into surprise police custody. The whole routine tapped into the ’00s zeitgeist of thrilling exposure, gleeful shaming and morality panic — “like Punk’d for pedophiles”, as Jimmy Kimmel once put it.
