Trivia / Dateline

• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: Contrary to the memes, Chris Hansen never introduces himself to a predator with his name, instead saving it for The Reveal at the end of a conversation.
• He Also Did: In one of the weirder bits of celebrity trivia, Keith Morrison was the stepfather of Matthew Perry (Perry was 10 when Morrison married his mother).
• Keep Circulating the Tapes To Catch A Predator is no longer available in any official capacity, but episodes are easy to find online along with a lot of periphery content such as the chatlogs and uncut interviews.
  • As a very literal example, Lorne Armstrong's uncut interview with Chris Hansen comes not from an official source, but from Lorne himself, who sent a tape of it to a catfish believing that it showed him more favorably. This tape also happened to contain Travis Fowler's interview too; all of the other uncut interviews from the Bowling Green sting have not been released.
• Missing Episode: To Catch A Predator features several bonus segments that have not been fully archived for various reasons. Perverted Justice for legal reasons could only upload the chatlogs of predators who were convicted or either died or absconded before their trial, leaving some chatlogs of acquitted predators missing from the public record (most notably, this means almost everybody from the Texas sting). Chris Hansen's uncut interviews for some of the stings were available as extras on MSNBC's website, not all of which have resurfaced. Finally, some police interviews with the predators (which only short segments of are shown on the show) have been made available thanks to Freedom of Information requests, but most remain confidential.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: Rumors persisted for a few years in the 2000s that one time a crew member of To Catch a Predator ordered a pizza, and the poor delivery guy was mistaken for the predator when he showed up to the house. This never actually happened.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor:
  • The GM pickup fiasco in 1992 led to the two producers involved leaving the network and the correspondent for the segment, Michelle Gillen, being demoted to anchoring for the NBC affiliate in Miami.
  • The fallout from Louis Conradt's suicide got the "To Catch a Predator" segments canceled.
  • Chris Hansen was forced out of his job after it emerged that he was engaged in an extramarital affair with a much younger local NBC reporter from Florida.
• Sleeper Hit: To Catch a Predator was just another one-off investigative journalism piece when it first aired, but it quickly became a pop culture phenomenon, became a recurring segment and made Chris Hansen a household name.
• Technology Marches On: Part of the reason the stings are no longer done, cited by the website they worked with when it stopped activities in 2019, is the rise of social media sites making it a lot harder to work than when the activities of the accused were limited to chatrooms and other similar spaces.

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