A decade ago, HBO aired one of its biggest — and most controversial — shows ever. It now has a sequel that’s already one of 2024’s most addictive series.
the most infamous hot mic moment ever to air on television shocked the world. Real estate scion Robert Durst, who had been implicated, but had thus far escaped justice in three murders committed from 1982 to 2003, inexplicably agreed to sit for a series of interviews with filmmaker Andrew Jarecki. The director had made a fictional feature film, All Good Things, that was loosely based on the disappearance of Durst’s first wife, Kathie, starring Barbie actor Ryan Gosling and Civil War‘s Kirsten Dunst.
Confronted, finally, with near-irrefutable evidence collected by Jarecki’s team that seemed to implicate Durst in the murder of his best friend Susan Berman in 2001, Durst lumbered off to the bathroom, where, forgetting his microphone was still on, he murmured, “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.” Such was the ending of The Jinx, a phenomenon for HBO when it aired more than nine years ago. But there was more story still to tell, and Jarecki’s follow-up, The Jinx: Part Two, now airing on HBO and streaming on Max, bucks the odds by sustaining the intensity and pure weirdness with which The Jinx concluded nearly a decade ago.A new cast of larger-than-life characters
Jarecki’s approach to telling Durst’s story, of which his own on-camera presence has always been a significant part, runs the risk of skirting self-promotion. It would therefore be easy to dismiss Jarecki’s follow-up series as an attempt to chase the highs of 2015, when he won two Emmys and became the talk of Hollywood. But Durst’s confession was followed by events of truly high drama – a desperate bid for an escape to Cuba, a dramatic arrest, a high-profile trial – featuring fantastically unlikely characters not even touched upon in The Jinx’s first outing.
Such a figure is Nick “Chinga” Chavin, a rhinestone-studded singer of pornographic country songs turned white-collar advertising executive, who in the 1980s became the third in the trio of bosom buddies that also included Durst and Berman.
