Why are we watching strangers love celebrities now

'Primetime' is Lance Oppenheim's documentary about a man in Florida fixated on a television star—a parasocial relationship so specific. Singular in its architecture that it could collapse into ridicule in any number of directions. Instead, Oppenheim has made something that refuses that collapse.

For decades, documentary cinema built its authority on distance. Grey Gardens presented the Beale women's delusion as spectacle. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend framed the protagonist's obsession as something the viewer could safely diagnose from their couch. The genre's moral grammar depended on you being smarter, healthier, saner than the person on screen. You were the audience to their pathology.

Oppenheim abandons that setup entirely. He films his subject's fixation not as evidence of something wrong but as evidence of something real: the architecture of attachment when you have no other architecture to attach to. He does not position himself as scientist studying a specimen. He positions himself as witness to an emotional fact.

This matters because it reflects a wholesale recalibration in how we think about parasocial relationships themselves. We used to treat them as humiliation—evidence that someone had failed at actual connection. We now understand them as one of the legitimate ways humans form meaning, especially when conventional intimacy has been systematically unavailable. A man's devotion to a television star is not pathology waiting to be exposed. It is survival. The camera doesn't need to hold it at arm's length to remain honest.

When you stop making documentaries to prove you're smarter than your subject, you start making something closer to portraiture. You start asking what someone needs badly enough to build a life around it. That question carries no moral immunity for the viewer. It implicates everyone watching, everyone building meaning from images of people who will never know they exist.