‘The Jinx: Part Two’ Showed the Impossible Task of Topping a True Crime Classic

variety.com:

Alison Herman TV Critic No one could top the sensational ending to “The Jinx” — not even “The Jinx.” In 2015, the HBO true crime docuseries profiling New York real estate heir and alleged serial murderer Robert Durst shocked the world by catching Durst on a hot microphone making an apparent confession. “Killed them all, of course” was hardly a smoking gun from a legal point of view, but as television, those five words were the kind of stunning revelation that decades-old cold cases rarely provide.

That Durst himself delivered the line in his distinctive, croaking rasp lent the whole saga the air of Greek tragedy, epitomizing the millionaire’s bizarre compulsion to unburden himself to filmmaker Andrew Jarecki in defiance of his own good luck. “The Jinx: Part Two” concludes on a more anticlimactic note.

Despite Durst’s 2021 conviction for the murder of his former friend Susan Berman and, in 2022, his death in prison, the legal aftermath of his crimes continues to play out in the courts. (In an especially cruel twist, the conviction was posthumously vacated due to an incomplete appeal.) The final scene in the six-episode season, equal in length to the first, is taken from a deposition in an ongoing case — a wrongful death suit brought by the family of Durst’s first wife, Kathie McCormack, against his estate.

The opposing counsel asks Durst’s second wife, Debrah Charatan, if her seeming complicity in exchange for access to Durst’s fortune has been worth it. “I think it was,” she says.