The Jinx — Part 2 Gets Trapped in Its Own Fame-Themed Ouroboros

The push-pull of the true-crime genre is that, no matter how much it intends to give a voice to the victims, it more often gives notoriety to the accused. 

This is certainly the case if the accused is someone like Robert Durst, the bumbling, garrulous, eccentric, and wealthy septuagenarian at the center of Andrew Jarecki, Marc Smerling, and Zac Stuart-Pontier’s Emmy-winning 2015 docuseries, The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst. That program famously included Durst seemingly confessing to three murders — the 1982 disappearance and assumed death of his first wife, Kathie Durst, the 2000 shooting of his friend Susan Berman, and the 2001 killing and dismembering of his neighbor Morris Black — because a hot mic caught him muttering to himself “killed them all, of course.” 

The FBI arrested Durst in New Orleans the night before the final episode of The Jinx aired. He was eventually tried and convicted for Berman’s murder. He was in custody of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation when he died of cardiac arrest in January 2022.

But, mostly because of his personality and the hijinx presented by The Jinx — he’d disguised himself as a mute woman while living near Black, for example — Durst’s legacy in pop culture endures. (Fred Armisen gives a particularly great impression of a Durst-like character in Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt). 

We can’t really say the same about his victims. And this is what makes the follow-up series, The Jinx — Part 2, which premieres April 21 on HBO, so frustrating. The second chapter, which airs in six installments with the first four being made available to critics, breaks down Durst’s trial for killing Berman and introduces a new cast of eccentric friends and witnesses. 

There’s Doug Oliver, the New York real estate mogul who owes a large part of his financial success to his relationship with Durst and more-or-less dares the prosecution to pay for his private jet’s flight to Los Angeles if they want him to turn on his friend. There’s Nick "Chinga" Chavin, a one-time musician known for melding country and glam rock to create earworms like “Cum Stains on the Pillow” but who owes his move into the white-collared world of ad executives to Durst’s real estate dealings. And there’s his childhood best friend Stewart Altman, an attorney, and his wife Emily, who cries to investigators that “Jewish wealthy men don't kill people” (or at least not the ones who were high school besties with her husband).

The filmmakers know what we’re thinking. So does the prosecution. As Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney John Lewin deadpans to the camera “it turns out that, when you have a whole lot of money, people are willing to do things for ya because they think some of that money is going to go their way.”

But this is more than just a story of money. It’s one of fame; both the desire for it and how it can be exploited. Or, as musician Chavin acknowledges of what it was like to party with Durst in his heyday, “walking down that aisle and having so many people gawk at you; it's a kick. It's bigger than performing."

Much of The Jinx — Part 2 centers on the interviews and preparations for the Berman trial, as Durst had already been acquitted for Morris’ killing before the first Jinx aired and officials in New York had never had enough evidence to make something stick to the whereabouts of Kathie Durst. 

More details are given about Berman’s own history as the daughter of mobster ​​David Berman, her intense friendship with Durst and the likelihood that she played some kind of role in what happened to Durst’s wife. There’s also lots of recordings of Durst’s calls from jail and corny Unsolved Mysteries-like reenactments of them, such as imagining what would have been his escape to Cuba after the first series aired had he not been apprehended in New Orleans (among Durst’s possessions upon that arrest: a .38 caliber revolver, five ounces of marijuana, some Americans’ average yearly income in cash and a latex mask that would have made Buffalo Bill grimace). 

The Jinx — Part 2 is full of the ridiculous and absurd. But is it anything new? The Berman murder trial was one of the most well-documented this century. Unlike the first Jinx, in fact because of the first Jinx, anyone who wanted to know anything about what Durst and his cohorts were up to could have easily read the newspaper stories, listened to podcasts or streamed the trial online. We don’t need to see a set of twin brothers who were working for the prosecution yelling “Booooob” in their best Durst impressions and one-upping each other over medical jargon like stents versus shunts. All that does is attempt to both-sides that the prosecution has noteworthy characters too.

The first Jinx already taught us that Durst is a weird guy who can’t keep his mouth shut. The second Jinx just teaches us that he has weird friends who are conflicted about whether they should do the same. It is both a congratulatory pat on the back for Jarecki and his team as well as a chance to poke fun at someone whom we’ve already decided is a mockable villain. It’s a fame-themed ouroboros because it’s a show that gives coverage to a trial that itself is famous because the show made it so. And with Durst dead and the trial long over, it’s hard to tell if the two episodes not released to critics will produce as enticing a smoking gun as the first season’s finale.

It’s also playing right into Durst’s hand. He knows he has the right to an attorney upon his arrest, but he blabbers on without one. He knew his visits from friends and phone calls from jail were being recorded. He even stops one conversation to let district attorney Lewin know that this trial is going to be a zoo.

From a prosecutorial point of view, this is fine. Even if Berman did help Durst cover up his first wife’s murder, it doesn’t mean that she deserved to be shot execution-style in her home several decades later. Justice was served and Durst spent his scant remaining years in jail.

But maybe that’s also what he wanted. Maybe he was tired of running away and instead tried to run into infamy. And isn’t that the worst thing a true-crime project can do? 

The Jinx — Part 2 premieres April 21 at 10 p.m. E.T. on HBO and Max. Join the discussion about the show in our forums. 

Whitney Friedlander is an entertainment journalist with, what some may argue, an unhealthy love affair with her TV. A former staff writer at both Los Angeles Times and Variety, her writing has also appeared in Cosmopolitan, Vulture, The Washington Post and others. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, son, daughter, and two spoiled cats.