Hey, remember The Jinx? In the early months of 2015, the HBO docuseries became a phenomenon, with director Andrew Jarecki leading rapt audiences with increasing firmness toward the conclusion that the wealthy, eccentric real estate heir Robert Durst had murdered three people and gotten away with it. It even played a role in finally bringing Durst to justice. More than 30 years after the disappearance of his first wife, Kathie, Durst was arrested on March 15, the day before the airing of The Jinx’s finale, in which Durst appeared to confess to his crimes.
If you struggle to recall all this (and, to be fair, 2015 was at least two Before Times ago), don’t worry: The Jinx Part Two has got you covered. Jarecki’s nine-years-later sequel, which starts airing on HBO this Sunday, opens in full “Previously on …” mode, recapping not just the contents of The Jinx’s conclusion but the reaction to it. From police investigators to crime reporters to Durst himself, the subjects of the new series incessantly refer to the old one—or at least the footage of them Jarecki and his editors choose to use does. “The dumbest thing I ever did was doing Jarecki,” laments Durst, who spent 20 hours being interviewed for the original series. “Oh, God: The Jinx.”
Jarecki, who managed to uncover evidence that the police and the FBI had spent decades looking for, is arguably entitled to a victory lap. But maybe not six, which is how many episodes The Jinx Part Two lasts. (HBO provided critics with four in advance.) The climax of the first episode, titled “Why Are You Still Here?” isn’t some bombshell piece of new information: It’s a room full of people watching The Jinx, gasping as Durst mumbles his apparent hot-mic confession: “Killed them all, of course.”
Although Jarecki presents his methods as investigative, they’re really prosecutorial. Durst’s defense lawyers appear in The Jinx Part Two, but they’re there to complicate the plot, not present alternate points of view. They’re a colorful bunch—David Chesnoff’s Las Vegas office features a giant painting of Elvis propped against a wall—but not an especially credible one. (Chesnoff doesn’t even seem to believe himself when he makes the argument that in an environment driven by sensationalism, the rich and famous are the real underdogs.) Jarecki showed his hand years before The Jinx’s first episode, when he dramatized Durst’s story in a 2010 feature called All Good Things, in which Ryan Gosling plays an heir named David Marks who, it’s heavily implied, murders his wife, his best friend, and a neighbor, in circumstances that parallel the deaths of Kathie Durst, Susan Berman, and Morris Black. The filmmaker had already settled on his culprit, and all that remained was to catch him out. (Part Two includes footage from the film, and Jarecki’s production company is called Good Things.) Each part of The Jinx quotes a figure repeating the maxim that homicide detectives “work for God.” Jarecki seems to believe he’s on an equivalent crusade.
Given how often Robert Durst exploited his family fortune to stay ahead of the law, there’s something poetic about Jarecki using his own resources—his father was a billionaire financier, and the two were co-founders of Moviefone, which sold for nearly $400 million in 1999—to offset Durst’s. But not everyone who falls in his sights has a team of high-priced lawyers to push back. Part Two’s third episode, “Saving My Tears Until It’s Official,” focuses on Durst’s trial for the murder of Susan Berman, a longtime friend who helped establish his alibi at the time of his wife’s disappearance. But a taped conversation with the author Albert Goldman, who apparently recorded his phone calls as a matter of habit, calls into question just how much Berman knew about Durst’s actions. Because Jarecki is building a case, he doesn’t risk letting us hear the recording to formulate an opinion of our own. He keeps cutting into the playback so that others can tell us what we’re hearing, making sure we come to the same conclusion the series does: that Berman was in some ways complicit in her own death. It’s jarring to hear a filmmaker who’s spent over a decade pushing for Durst to face justice start a sentence about one of his victims with, “It’s terrible when somebody gets murdered, but …”
For all the time Jarecki spends contemplating his own achievements, there’s little evidence that he’s spent any reflecting on the criticisms of the original Jinx. Journalists who dug into the series’ account found that it had misrepresented key details, like insinuating that a desperate Durst only agreed to be interviewed after he was taken into custody by the police, when in fact the interviews took place the year before his arrest. And filmmakers raised issues with the series’ cliffhanger-driven storytelling, which made for both “bad cinema and bad journalism.” (The series’ runaway success also spawned a slew of sloppy, morally shaky imitations and helped make quickie true-crime docs a mainstay of the streaming boom.) The only lesson Jarecki seems to have taken away is that what he did worked, so he might as well do it again.
With the primary objective of getting Durst behind bars already achieved, The Jinx Part Two is even more at pains than the first to stretch its length to six episodes, and now that it’s no longer a story about a nutty eccentric who might be a killer but a man we’re convinced is a serial murderer, the diversions into amusing side material feel even more like filler. Jarecki can be an angel of justice, or he can be the guy who really wants to tell you about the fact that one of Robert Durst’s closest friends released X-rated country music under the name Chinga Chavin, but it’s pretty tough to do both.
Considering how diligently the first Jinx parceled out its surprises, it’s likely, given the way HBO is keeping the final two episodes of Part Two under lock and key, that they have something similar in store. But the series no longer has the element of surprise on its side. Durst hid in plain sight for decades, but The Jinx made him recognizable enough to be parodied on Saturday Night Live, and much of what Part Two treats as surprises will be familiar to those who followed the ample coverage of Durst’s trial. Given that Durst was convicted of Berman’s murder in 2021 and died in early 2022, what’s left for The Jinx to accomplish?
Due as much to an accident of timing as anything, The Jinx was frequently discussed alongside Serial, but where Sarah Koenig’s podcast questioned the workings of the justice system, Jarecki’s series essentially works in tandem with the system: At one point, Jarecki and his team had to be warned not to take an incriminating letter—the one where Durst fatefully misspelled Beverly Hills—directly to the police, lest they be categorized as law enforcement agents. The classics of the true-crime form are those, like Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line and Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost trilogy, that question the authorities’ rush to judgement and prompt their audiences to rethink their own relationships to the official narrative. The Jinx exists to make the case that sometimes the authorities just need a helping hand.
