Television series
The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst
- Serial killer
- Mystery
- Biopic
- Very dark
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.
Should you watch it?
Watch it if you like true-crime documentaries built like slow puzzles, where the filmmakers' own access and doubts become part of the mystery and the interviews do the heavy lifting.
Skip it if you want a tidy case closed or a sleek thriller, since it moves at a deliberate, talky pace and treats real killings and a family's wreckage with sober seriousness.
What it asks of you: Installments run under an hour each, so the stretch adds up over several evenings, and it rewards close attention to dates, transcripts and who seems to be hedging.
Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.
If you liked this
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.
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.
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.
Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
People
Production
- Jason BlumExecutive Producer
Recommended by
Twin Peaks, Rear Window, Disturbia, The Keepers, The Thin Blue Line, Making a Murderer, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, Capturing the Friedmans, Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father, Cropsey, The Imposter, Three Identical Strangers, Amanda Knox, Tickled, Don't F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer, Casting JonBenet, American Murder: The Family Next Door, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, Searching for Sugar Man, Soupçons, Evil Genius: The True Story of America's Most Diabolical Bank Heist, McMillion$, Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness, I'll Be Gone in the Dark, Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer, Murder Among the Mormons, Crime Scene, Evil Genius, O.J.: Made in America, The Seven Five, Poker Face, Death Note, Mommy Dead and Dearest, Columbo, Veronica Mars, The Fall, Kumaré, The Honeymoon Killers, The Closer, Escape at Dannemora, Criminal Minds, 24 Hours in Police Custody, The Batman, Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger, I Am a Killer, The Case Against Adnan Syed, El Sicario, Room 164, Wisconsin Death Trip, Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer, The Poisoner's Handbook, Blindspot, The Iceman Tapes: Conversations with a Killer, Batman: The Long Halloween, Part One, The Armstrong Lie, Paradise Lost, Helter Skelter, The First 48, Crazy Love, The Confession Killer, Trial By Media, The Chaser, Agatha Christie: Lucy Worsley on the Mystery Queen, 51 Birch Street, Murder in the Heartland, Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes, Long Shot, The Staircase, My Amityville Horror, Candy, Catching Killers, Crazy, Not Insane, Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa, Tokyo Idols, You Cannot Kill David Arquette, Murder Mountain, The Stepfather, Unabomber - In His Own Words, Surviving R. Kelly, At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal, American Dharma, Punk'd, Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, 48 Hours, Homicide Hunter: Lt. Joe Kenda, The Killing Season, American Justice, Homicide Hunter: American Detective, Unsolved Mysteries, Kurt & Courtney, Biggie & Tupac, The Colbys, Heist, Dateline NBC, Voyeur, Tig, The Laramie Project, Allen v. Farrow, Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal, Unmasking a Monster: Aileen Wuornos, Killer Ratings, The Killer in My Family, Pretend It's a City, Avicii - My Last Show, Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, Documenting Hate: Charlottesville, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press, Des, Murder in the First, Court Cam, My Brother the Islamist, Gacy, Murder on Middle Beach, Mosaic, All Good Things, The Motive, Caniba, The Pet Cemetery Murders: A Ghost Story, Killer Legends, BuzzFeed Unsolved: True Crime, Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends, Late Night with the Devil, The Investigator: A British Crime Story, Tabloid, Rock of Love with Bret Michaels, Lockup, Worst Roommate Ever, The Jeffrey Dahmer Files, Capturing the Killer Nurse, You Can See Everything, The Last Narc, Firing Line with Margaret Hoover, The Rachel Maddow Show, El Secreto de Selena, Zoo, A Gray State, After Porn Ends, Out of Thin Air, Gosnell: The Trial of America's Biggest Serial Killer, Swipe Right on the Devil, 20/20, Good Morning America, Sins of My Father, There's Something Wrong with Aunt Diane, The Real Manhunt: The Night Stalker, La masacre de Flores, Killing Fields, Unsolved, Catch and Kill: The Podcast Tapes, Farmlands, Hunting Hitler, Poeta Caníbal, The New York Times Presents, Rise of the Rockstar Chef, Taken: Natalee Holloway, Atlanta's Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children, Tales of the Grim Sleeper, Killing for Love