Pop Culture Diary: This Week's Reviews, Reads and Roundup

What I've Been into...

"Primetime." Ain't technology grand? Always providing new avenues of deviance and fresh ways to exploit, undermine and harm one another. And A.I. wasn't even in the horizon back in the early 2000s when "To Catch a Predator" aired on NBC.

The show marked the final inhalation before the long last gasp of network TV. Audiences were beginning to drift away from hour-long dramas, given that HBO and others were doing such a better job of it, so the nets pivoted to "reality."

Taking advantage of what then constituted social media — online chatrooms — Chris Hansen's show specialized in luring pedophiles into false encounters with teens. Arriving for a rendezvous, would-be offenders instead found TV cameras and Hansen with a mic.

American TV viewers, of course, ate it up. The show fed their base instincts with a side order of moral superiority.

"Primetime" plays with this tension, forcing us to reflect on who's wrong in this picture: The predators, the media, or we, the audience? The answer turns out to be all of the above. But the remaining question is, what fires this desire to see others ensnared in a trap? We know the predators are creeps and bad guys, but what's our deal? Humans are strange, troubled creatures and unprepared to deal with the tools we create.

Robert Pattinson is spectacular as the devious, troubled and flawed Hansen, a stand-in for us all. Skyler Gisondo is deeply moving as an unwitting actor lured by Hansen to act as bait for creeps. And Merritt Wever is excellent as Hansen's producer, content to ratchet up the manufactured drama of "To Catch a Predator" the point where she finally sees the darkness that's started to consume her.

"Primetime" is witty, seductive and unsettling, and it raises questions worth ruminating over as our society meshes ever more deeply with technology. How will we use it? How will it use us?