Serialized examinations of true-crime murder cases have recently become a popular trend in podcasting and subscription television, as evident in the critical and commercial success of the podcast Serial (2014) and the Netflix series Making a Murderer (2015). If conventional feature-length crime documentaries, by allowing for the inclusion of a wider range of relevant material, provide an antidote to the television tabloid strategy of streamlining complex cases down to their most sensational elements, these long-form series go further by allotting hours on end for the presentation of vast amounts of evidence with nuanced attention to detail. In an age when “binge-watching” consumption habits increasingly drive television production, these programs encourage viewers to become part of the investigation by absorbing a significant amount of evidence, testimony, and subjective reflection in multiple one-hour installments. This strategy is perhaps best exemplified by HBO’s mini-series The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (2015). This roughly five-hour, six-part documentary is director Andrew Jarecki’s second attempt to tell the story of the wealthy real estate heir and multiple-murder suspect Robert Durst, following a narrative feature entitled All Good Things (2009). The Jinx’s massive viewership and generous critical acclaim stand in contrast to All Good Things’ lukewarm reception, highlighting the divergent success of their equally opposing goals. As a fiction feature “based on a true story,” All Good Things is narratively structured to humanize and even exculpate its Durst-inspired protagonist. By contrast, The Jinx presents an overwhelming case for Durst’s calculating and cold-blooded nature, climaxing with Jarecki’s coercion of an apparently spontaneous and inadvertent confession of guilt. An analysis of All Good Things and The Jinx reveals not only the tension inherent in the process of transmuting true life accounts for fictionalized representation onscreen, but also the inevitable failure of documentary storytelling (regardless of length or format) to present evidence in any way worth calling ‘complete.’ This tension and failure are clearest in the ways in which Jarecki’s adaptation of his dramatic treatment of Durst’s story to long-form documentary fundamentally shifts the dramatic structure of this story in ways expressly facilitated by their respective formats.