Television series

The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst

Six episodes, one impossibly wealthy, impossibly strange man, and the slow unspooling of a decades-old mystery that ends in one of the most jaw-dropping moments ever captured on camera. Andrew Jarecki gets extraordinary access to Robert Durst and just lets him talk. It's patient, unsettling, and builds to a finish that genuinely earns the word unbelievable.

TVMaze rating6.8

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Soupçons2004

The French documentary that basically invented this genre of embedded access to a murder suspect through years of trial. Same slow-burn ambiguity, same discomfort at how much you come to like the accused.

But It's long, deliberately unresolved, and offers no Durst-style gotcha ending — the uncertainty is the whole point.

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Capturing the Friedmans2003

Jarecki's own earlier film, and arguably his masterpiece — a family implodes under accusations that may or may not be true, told with home video footage that gets more disturbing the longer you sit with it.

But Even murkier than The Jinx; there's no confession, no smoking gun, just a family destroyed and no clean answer.

Capturing the Friedmans poster

Making a Murderer2015

The Netflix series that kicked off the modern true-crime binge boom, built on the same principle as The Jinx: give the story room and let a small town's institutional rot reveal itself slowly.

But Ten hours per season, heavily one-sided in its advocacy, and it never delivers a single moment as electric as Durst's.

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Thin Blue Line1988

The Jinx's entire visual language — moody reenactments, unreliable narrators, the sense that a documentary can be as constructed as a thriller — descends directly from this film.

Errol Morris's stylised, dreamlike reconstruction of a murder case that actually got an innocent man off death row — the film that invented the reenactment-heavy, truth-is-slippery grammar Jarecki borrows wholesale.

But Its hypnotic, art-house pacing and hazy 1980s aesthetic feel a world away from HBO's slick prestige-doc polish.

The Thin Blue Line poster
More like this (8)

Wild Wild Country2018

A wild, archive-stuffed saga about a cult, a small Oregon town, and a woman who might be a mass murderer — the same pleasure of watching someone charismatic and possibly dangerous hold a camera's attention.

But It sprawls across a much bigger cast of characters than Durst's one-man show, and the pacing meanders in the middle.

Wild Wild Country poster

Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes2019

Archival death-row audio of Bundy talking about himself in the third person — the same eerie thrill of hearing a killer narrate his own myth, just with less mystery about guilt.

But There's no whodunit tension here; you know exactly who he is, so the horror is different — colder, more clinical.

Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes poster

The Keepers2017

An unsolved murder, institutional cover-up, and amateur investigators doing the digging law enforcement wouldn't — that same sense of ordinary people cracking open a decades-old case.

But Heavier subject matter involving abuse within the Catholic Church, and it's angrier and sadder than The Jinx ever gets.

The Keepers poster

Don't F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer2019

Internet sleuths hunt a killer in real time, and the show has its own version of the hot-mic moment — the thrill of watching a predator get cornered by his own arrogance.

But Genuinely upsetting animal cruelty footage early on; some viewers won't get past the first episode.

Don't F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer poster

American Murder: The Family Next Door2020

Told entirely through texts, police footage, and social media — no talking heads, just raw material assembled into a devastating portrait of a killer who seemed, to everyone, completely normal.

But It's a tight ninety minutes with none of The Jinx's slow accumulation of dread — more gut-punch than puzzle.

American Murder: The Family Next Door poster

Abducted in Plain Sight2017

A jaw-dropping, almost absurd true story told by a family who somehow keep giving a predator second chances — you'll gasp at the sheer audacity of it, much like you did with Durst's confession.

But It leans into shock value hard, and some find its tone tips toward the exploitative rather than the illuminating.

Abducted in Plain Sight poster

Serial Experiments Lain1998

Same historical moment, same appetite reshaped for a different medium: an audience falling in love with watching (or hearing) an investigator's certainty erode in public.

The podcast that proved true crime could be a slow-burn, serialized obsession — Sarah Koenig thinking out loud about guilt and doubt in real time, the same addictive not-quite-sure feeling as watching Durst on tape.

But No visuals at all, and the central mystery stays genuinely unresolved — there's no equivalent of the bathroom mic moment here.

Serial Experiments Lain poster

Shadow of a Doubt1943

Both hinge on the unbearable charisma of a possible killer hiding in plain sight among people who love him — Cotten is the fictional blueprint for the real Durst.

Hitchcock's favourite of his own films: a charming, beloved uncle comes to stay, and the family slowly realises he might be a serial killer. Joseph Cotten is magnetic in exactly the way Durst is on camera.

But It's a scripted 1940s thriller with none of the real-stakes queasiness of true crime — pure Hollywood craft, not investigation.

Shadow of a Doubt poster

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