Primetime has an interesting look that’s the key to its worldview, which is that our society is so bad that no one can escape its infecting qualities. There’s a smeary effect around the edge of the lens in many shots, which are generally in shallow focus, making everything appear greasy and defiled and half-hidden. This is in addition to a lurid color scheme dominated by nasty shades of red, green, and blue that are often clashing with each other, so that characters’ faces emerge out of surroundings that seem disgustingly tainted. Robert Pattinson, playing Chris Hansen — the real-life former host of the hit NBC Dateline series To Catch a Predator that ran from 2004 to 2007 — appears in certain close-ups with his face suffused in an unwholesome tint of hellfire red. Appropriately enough, much of the film was shot with an actual colonoscopy camera.

Hansen is portrayed as a self-deluding creep who ultimately gets less sympathy than the entrapped pedophiles. At some level, it seems, Hansen knows how rotten he is. In an early scene, when he’s in the first-class section on an airplane with a seatmate who’s a big fan of the show, he quickly warms to all the praise. He starts to confide in the sadistic old man, who ultimately wants to know: Doesn’t Hansen want to personally beat up the sexual predators he puts on camera? “Don’t you want to make them bleed?” he asks in a hideous close-up.

And Hansen brags, with a horrible shit-eating grin, that actually, “I think what we do might be even worse.”