The Jinx – Part Two review: Killing time

Robert Durst is a good murderer and a shit criminal. “I think he would be free today if he had just kept his trap shut,” New York Times reporter Charles Bagli explains in the premiere of The Jinx – Part Two, the followup to the 2015 HBO series chronicling Durst’s history of murder allegations.

Bagli isn’t covering new territory for returning Jinx viewers; anyone who glanced at the news in March 2015 knows what Durst unhinged his trap to say. “There it is, you’re caught,” Durst mumbled to himself while mic-ed up in the bathroom in the finale, just after director Andrew Jarecki confronts him with evidence that he shot his friend Susan Berman execution-style in 2000. “Killed them all, of course.” Part one lived and died in the unnerving confession captured in the final minutes. For a brief moment (that Netflix’s Making A Murderer immediately milked), it seemed like true crime could be some sort of conduit for justice. With this same righteous tone, Part Two promises eight years’ worth of new revelations that shocked even Jarecki. But what’s the urgency in sifting through them now?

Getting away with murder is a symptom of systemic travesty that needs changing. (Non-profits like the Innocence Project address this materially.) But The Jinx – Part Two isn’t quite the audience’s trial of Durst, a literal armchair expert’s chance for some conviction. Durst died in the hospital in 2022 a few months after he was convicted of killing Berman in the first degree. Jarecki first adapted Durst’s story in the 2010 drama All Good Things. This means that Durst was portrayed on the big screen by Ryan Gosling and starred in his own HBO series before he was ever convicted of a crime. If it sounds self-indulgent, ding ding ding. The assassin and the assassinated are all dead now; the filmmaker and audience are killing time.

The Jinx expands on a strong procedural tradition employed by 1988’s The Thin Blue Line, the 2004 French miniseries The Staircase, and Jarecki’s own 2003 doc Capturing The Friedmans. But the water-cooler experience of the 2014 podcast Serial, released just a few months before The Jinx aired its premiere, sets the clearest precedent for the show’s big trick. The Jinx dared the audience to connect with Durst beyond courtroom footage or headlines. If Durst has “cooperated,” if Jarecki will rest his hand on Durst’s shoulder for a photo, if the domestic violence and dismemberment happened all those years ago, how dangerous can an octogenarian be?

It resonated with jurors that Durst was elderly, and had a shunt implanted in his skull; it’s much more important for Part Two’s purposes that he was extremely funny. Jarecki understands that as an unsympathetic character, Durst’s best shot with an audience is his classic clowning. Durst tells cops he was on meth “the whooooole time” he filmed part one. He demonstrates “lady push-ups” to Susie Giardino—described in the series as his “pen pal/girlfriend/girl Friday”—from prison. He swears like a sailor through a struggle to access his voicemail in the recorded call that informed his New Orleans arrest; picturing comic-book bubbles drifting over his head, I empathized. Where Serial and Netflix’s late 2015 Making A Murderer treated their accused as lambs unjustly dressed for slaughter, both parts of The Jinx let Durst do the musically bumbling talking where a bleeding heart might. As John Mulaney wonders aloud in a stand-up set featured in the third episode: “I like this guy. Why do I like this guy?”

Part Two features fewer interviews with Durst (zero) than its predecessor but still doesn’t let Mulaney off the hook. Durst’s cartoonish post-part-one finale escape plan—head for Cuba in a motorboat flush with cash and wearing a rubber mask while an old juror ally clears out his apartment—pales in comparison to how he plays into his frailty ahead of the trial. The stolen chicken sandwich that led to Bob’s 2001 arrest was laid out like an oddball breadcrumb in part one, intended to contextualize his participation. This time around, Jarecki deploys Bob’s foibles as a murder suspect—the curse-heavy failed attempt to check his voicemail that leads to his arrest, the “lady push-ups” he demonstrates to his “girl Friday” Susie Giardino from jail, the maybe-fake neck brace he wears to court—with sharp comic timing.

It’s a good thing Jarecki has jokes filling in for spoilable bombshells; since Max merged with Discovery+, the reliable intersection of slow-crime procedural and primetime appointment viewing has deteriorated. It’s not just tougher for The Jinx to recapture the drama of that muffled “killed them all” because the case is closed and Durst is dead. Television is changing. Series that might have warranted a month of hour-by-hour rollout in 2015 crest and fall from critical conversation over a weekend. Hybrid attempts at prestige docu-drama like Love Has Won: The Cult Of Mother God live alongside time-honored episodic sour candy like Mean Girl Murders and Fatal Vows. Even the online water-cooler that replaced real ones is dry and desperate for a new convergence point with a few less “M Y P U S S Y I N B I O” bots. Whatever revelations The Jinx – Part Two has to reveal won’t come to light in the same world part one captivated.

As a sequel, The Jinx – Part Two largely succeeds. It introduces engaging new characters like Durst’s confidante and “porn star country musician” Nick Chavin, his perpetually unamused wife Terry, and teen identical twin defense clerks Michael and David Belcher. It leans into prosecution dramedy less reliant on new bombshell evidence and humanizes the friends and lovers Durst endeared without assuaging their guilt. (An episode centered on Berman is the strongest of the four provided for review.) But the show doesn’t ameliorate the ineffectiveness writ large of true crime at this moment.

The Jinx – Part Two premieres April 21 on Max