Andrew Jarecki

Dive into the return of ‘The Jinx' on Max, which continues the story of Robert Durst.

When I first wrote about the true-crime documentary series The Jinx a couple of weeks ago, I was the only person I knew who was watching it. A few weeks later, it’s all anyone is talking about. It’s been one of the top trending topics on Twitter for three days straight, and my personal feed is clogged with debates about the case and the ethics of the filmmakers’ behavior. As I left my hotel in Austin yesterday morning, pundits were discussing the show on CNN; as I wrote most of this piece at the Austin airport, two men at the table next to me in the food court were talking about it as well. I spent a month recommending the show to people who looked at me like I was crazy (“The Jinx? Like the kid’s game?”). The show went from total obscurity to inescapable pop-cultural phenomenon in a matter of hours.

40 million. That’s the staggering number of downloads the Serial podcast racked up by the end of its first season in December of 2014. The show crossed over from popular podcast to full-blown cultural phenomenon. It launched a thousand thinkpieces, lit up social media, and jumpstarted legal proceedings in a cold case. Hell, even my parents listened to it. It must have been big.