Last night, The Jinx ended its six-episode run on HBO. The documentary series came to a conclusion with a stunning sequence of events, building a tremendous amount of suspense: would the second interview with Robert Durst happen? What would happen in that interview? And what would happen after that interview, when Robert Durst will have been confronted by the second “Beverley” envelope?
If you were watching live, the answers to those questions were an escalating series of events, culminating in a final scene that had me yelling at my television. However, if you weren’t watching live, that yelling may have been directed at The New York Times, who pushed an alert to their app users and wrote a breaking news tweet quoting Durst’s words and promoting their reporting on their connection to Durst’s Saturday arrest in New Orleans. It could have also been directed at the various outlets—Vulture, Buzzfeed, etc.—who subsequently tweeted the news as news, all of whom fielded complaints about “spoilers” from Twitter users.
In a piece this morning at Vulture, Ben Williams suggests that this marks “spoiler-alert” culture reaching “peak absurdity”:
“The key difference here is that The Jinx isn’t fiction. It is a docu-drama about a real man who is very probably a murderer multiple times over and whose cases have been covered in the media for decades. When a famous murder suspect all but confesses, it is news, and the fact that the confession happened within the confines of a television show does not mean that that news becomes subject to the same etiquette as the latest Game of Thrones killing. Because that’s fiction, and it doesn’t really matter.”
Beyond the fact that I would contend Durst’s statements in the finale of The Jinx in no way constitute a “confession,” Williams’ point is well-taken: the fact that Andrew Jarecki’s documentary series is making a contribution to an ongoing news story independent from the series itself means that the New York Times reporting is less spoiling the series itself—which they clearly had advance access to, in order to support the reporting—than they are extending the series’ impact to a broader audience, most of whom did not watch The Jinx (which drew only 446k viewers in the first airing of last week’s episode).
And yet while Williams’ distinction between a real life criminal investigation and Game of Thrones is valid, and would clear The New York Times in a court of ethics, I also think that the New York Times—and the other publications in question—could have crafted an equally provocative headline that did not actively spoil the events of the series’ final scene. I believe that the news could have been framed in a way that still broke the news in question without revealing in concrete detail the climactic moment of the series.
Cultural Learnings 