A24’s Primetime, directed by Lance Oppenheim and released on September 25, 2026, revisits NBC’s To Catch a Predator through Robert Pattinson’s Chris Hansen. Inspired by Luke Dittrich’s Esquire piece Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die, the film examines ratings-driven justice.
At its heart is Skyler Gisondo’s ‘Dan Plumb,’ aka Decoy Dan. It is a fictionalized take on real decoy Dan Schrack, an aspiring actor hired for USD 5,000 per sting who thought he’d do reenactments before confronting predators in the Murphy, Texas, operation.
Who was the real Decoy Dan, and where is he today?
Dan Schrack was the young male decoy at the center of NBC’s To Catch a Predator during its most controversial stretch. An aspiring actor with a background in musical theater and a Toys “R” Us commercial as his biggest prior credit, Schrack auditioned thinking he was signing up for dramatic reenactments.
He was instead placed into live, unscripted stings where he posed online and on the phone as a minor, luring targets to the decoy houses in Fort Myers, Florida, Petaluma, California, and most famously Murphy, Texas. He is credited on seven episodes of the show and was paid a reported USD 5,000 per shoot.
Decoy Dan’s voice and cadence on those decoy calls, which were slightly performative, nervous, and deliberately youthful, were documented extensively in Luke Dittrich’s 2007 Esquire article Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die, which later became the basis for Primetime. The Murphy operation defined his tenure.
Schrack was the decoy used to make contact with Rockwall County Assistant District Attorney Bill Conradt, a sting that ended with Conradt’s suicide when police and Dateline’s crew arrived at his home. That fallout stayed with Schrack. In a 2025 interview with Entertainment Weekly, he said, “You could offer me USD 10 million to film that episode in Texas again. I wouldn’t take it.”
After leaving the show, Schrack pivoted completely away from undercover work into traditional journalism. He worked as a producer in Buffalo, then as an anchor in Elmira, New York, before joining Rochester’s 13WHAM News team in June 2019. Now working as a news anchor and comedian, he has spoken openly about the ethical weight of the decoy work and does not appear to be credited or promoted in the official materials of Primetime.
What did he do for Chris Hansen, and how does Primetime portray ‘Dan Plumb’?
For Chris Hansen and the To Catch a Predator production, Dan Schrack was functional and essential. Hansen was the face and interrogator, but Schrack was the bait. His job was to maintain online chats, place decoy phone calls, and keep targets engaged long enough to get them to show up on camera.
Without a convincing decoy performance, the televised confrontation Hansen was famous for could not happen. The show depended on that engineered arrival, and Schrack’s youth, acting training, and willingness to improvise made him the go-to male decoy for high-profile stings.
A24’s Primetime fictionalizes Decoy Dan as ‘Dan Plumb,’ played by Skyler Gisondo, and deliberately changes the last name from Schrack to ‘Plumb’ to signal that this is not a strict biography. The film presents ‘Plumb’ as an aspiring actor who stumbles into the world of moral-panic television, excited at first by steady pay and proximity to a national show.
Lance Oppenheim uses ‘Plumb’ as the conscience of the operation, where Pattinson’s Hansen is driven by legacy and ratings. ‘Plumb’ also starts to question what performance is being asked of him. The movie extrapolates several real details from Dittrich’s reporting, including the USD 5,000 rate, the Toys “R” Us past, and the specific vocal intonations on calls.
But the film pushes Decoy Dan into more thematic territory. He is shown grappling with the blurred line between acting and entrapment, and his arc builds directly toward the Conradt sequence, which serves as the film’s climax and ethical breaking point. Phoebe Bridgers’ character ‘Del,’ likely inspired by decoy Del Harvey, mirrors that same unease. ‘Plumb’ is not portrayed as a villain or hero, but as a young gig worker caught inside Hansen’s machine that turned confrontation into primetime spectacle.
What are your thoughts about Decoy Dan? Let us know.
PC: skylergisondo/Instagram
Also Read: Nick Hogan’s Words About Brooke Resurface Amid Siblings’ Bitter Feud, ‘Really Exciting Time For Her’
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: bollywoodshaadis.com
