On The Jinx: Part Two , we spend no small amount of time watching people watch television. In the penultimate episode , we see Jim McCormack, brother of Robert Durst’s first wife and victim, Kathie, glued to a screen as the real-estate scion/psychopath receives the guilty verdict he deserves. Earlier in the season, we’re treated to re-creations of Durst watching The Jinx as it airs, recaps of which he would write as part of ongoing correspondence with a journalist.
This is a fitting motif, since so much about the Durst saga is inextricably linked to public spectacle. This extends to The Jinx itself, which achieved pop-culture immortality when the HBO docuseries closed out its original run in 2015 with the hot-mic moment heard around the world: “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.” Later deemed admissible in court, the recording of Durst would play an active role in his trial, underscoring how The Jinx , both as a phenomenon and as evidence, remained central to his fate through the end.
Even in an increasingly surreal world where reality and television and reality television are melding into one giant blob, it’s hard to overemphasize just how weird and unprecedented this entire situation is. It’s a shame, then, that Part Two swerves away from unpacking any of that. Well, not entirely.
The closest it comes to self-reflexivity arrives about thirty minutes into the opening chapter , when the episode cuts to footage of people gathering to view the final.