Hey, you're listening to the On the Media Midweek podcast. I'm Michael Loenger.

To set the scene for this episode, we're going back to November 2004, when the wildly successful to catch a predator first aired on television as a segment of NBC's Dateline.

This 32-year-old guy wants to spend a Sunday afternoon chilling with a 13-year-old girl

after texting her about getting stoned.

But Mike Manzi's date is about to go up in smoke.

The show eventually became one of the biggest and most influential true crime shows ever,

drawing 7 million viewers per episode by its final season in 2007.

David Osset is a filmmaker whose recent documentary titled Predators

probes the ugly legacy of the show, how it blurred the lines between justice and entertainment,

and what it says about us that we watched it. As David Osset tells it, there was a

script to how every bust went down. To Catch a Predator would set up hidden cameras in a stinghouse

where men who were having online chats of a sexual nature with decoys, pretending to be minors,

would then show up to a house and meet the decoys in person, and then they would talk to the decoys for a minute or two, and then they would meet a journalist named Chris Hansen, who they didn't know was a journalist as he'd come out. Are you comfortable there? Hi, sir. How are you? But he would then interview the men, ask them why they were there, then tell them they were being filmed on national television.

I'm Chris Hanson with Dayline NBC, and we're doing a story on their goals.

And tell them they were free to go.

You're free to walk out of this house right now.

And they would leave the house, and then they would be arrested by law enforcement.

This was a cultural phenomenon.

It aired for three years, about 20 episodes, made it across the world, and really became a seminal type of true crime entertainment before we really had true crime take over the airwaves.

Do you think that this show is responsible for kind of introducing the threat of child predators into modern

pop culture? The threat of predatory behavior towards children has been around for a very long time.

This show was one of the first times that we figured out how to, for lack of a better way of putting it,

...