Art imitating life, iImitating art
“I killed them all, of course”
Alleged murderer Robert Durst, during the HBO documentary The Jinx
Back in the mid-1980’s, during my time anchoring the syndicated show “Entertainment Tonight,” the program’s executive producer, Jack Reilly, hit me with a bombshell.
“Al, I don’t know whether you knew this, but 20 million people saw you last night.”
I wasn’t prepared for that.
I’d always considered myself to be socially awkward. Suppose I had spinach between my teeth?
I’d never really pondered that show’s viewership. But, in those days, when there were only a few channels available, that sounded reasonable.
Today, however, the average U.S. household receives an estimated 189.1 channels.
No matter how popular any show is, save the Super Bowl, most audiences are relatively smaller than they once were.
Sure, Fox News boasts of having the most watched cable news network. There’s no disputing that.
That really means for the week ending March 15th, Fox News averaged only 1.8 million viewers in primetime.
That’s because TV audiences can choose between; hands-full of HBO channels; a grab-bag full of sports channels; movie channels to suit everybody’s taste; and arms-full of niche cable channels that attract fragmented audiences.
Bill O’Reilly may be the unquestioned “King of Cable News,” but he faces stiff competition from stuff like the “How to Skin a Rabbit” channel that can now be seen (or streamed) to TVs, to tablets and even onto cell phones.
Here’s what happens when TV viewers sense they’re about to see something truly special.
On Feb. 2, when HBO aired the first of its six-part documentary titled “The Jinx; The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst” – nearly a million people (979,000) tuned in.
While I found each succeeding episode about the (could be) murderous, millionaire son of a New York City real estate tycoon quite fascinating -obviously many people didn’t.
Only about 446,000 people tuned in for the fifth installment.
That may have been an indication that people simply lost interest in the eccentric little septuagenarian, who may, or may not have murdered his wife in 1982 wife; took the life of his close friend in Beverly Hills in 2000; and murdered his Galveston neighbor, before he hacked him into little pieces in 2001.
“The Jinx” kept my wife and I wondering what would happen next.
We even made it a point to find and watch the 2009 movie loosely based on Durst titled “All Good Things.”
To heighten our interest, and the interests of many of the people who’d abandoned the show since its premiere, Durst was arrested in New Orleans for the 2000 murder of his Beverly Hills friend, and, coincidentally, on the day before the documentary’s dramatic conclusion.
That night, instead of 400,000 people eager to find out the source of Durst’s arrest, nearly double the audience – 802,000 people – tuned in.
At 8:36 PM on March 15 you may have heard the repeated thuds of 802,000 people’s jaws drop.
I know mine did.
Robert Alan Durst, who had repeatedly sidestepped responsibility for three suspected murders, muttered the words “You’re caught,” and “I killed them all, of course,” into the documentarian’s microphone, seemingly not knowing he might have been confessing to all three murders.
It had not only been “art imitating life.” It had become “art imitating life, imitating art.”
Within minutes, news stories containing Durst’s cold admission began to appear online.
Each of those stories seemed to indicate that Durst, himself, had written the final chapter in a murder mystery that had begun more than three decades ago.
It’s true that the director/producer/writer of The Jinx – Anthony Jarecki – juxtaposed certain events in order to build the documentary’s dramatic effect.
It’s also true that police authorities in California claim that the documentary played no role in Durst’s arrest. Police said already had enough evidence to bring charges against him, without using any of the show’s conclusions.
For me, though, it was six hours of startling and enjoyable television. The kind you simply don’t get every day, or every year, or, even, every decade.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net