The evidence might be circumstantial but there seems to be a true-crime renaissance happening in the upper echelons of liberal-minded non-fiction. People have been talking about The Jinx and Serial the way I can’t remember people talking about non-fiction before — they get all excited and say OMG a lot. Like the smart soap operas of the so-called Golden Era of TV, shows like House of Cards or Games of Thrones, these shows are guilty pleasures you don’t have to feel guilty about because they are safely highbrow. And while they’re certainly smarter than the shows about violent murders of […]

Like a lot of people, I’ve been hypnotized the past few weeks by Andrew Jarecki’s six-part HBO miniseries The Jinx. I’m not a TV writer, and I didn’t take notes while watching. These are five stand-alone observations in the interest of sharing in collective fascination with the series. NB: this is nothing but spoilers. 1. It’s completely germane that Andrew Jarecki (Princeton alum, father of a successful businessman, Moviefone co-founder) comes from money — his is surely the only family in America with the means to produce three documentary filmmaker siblings in the same generation. This privileged perspective has bitten […]