Spoilers follow for the season finale of HBO’s “The Jinx.”

Photo

HBO pioneered a new kind of appointment television on Sunday night: the nationally broadcast murder confession. At least that’s what we appeared to be hearing during the eerie closing moments of the six-part documentary “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” as Mr. Durst — recorded, unseen, in a hotel bathroom — said: “There it is. You’re caught.” And later: “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”

It was frightening, gut-wrenching, remarkable television, and the culmination of years of work by the documentary’s director and producer, Andrew Jarecki, and his crew. (As well as possibly the first major instance of spoiler alerts being issued for a documentary.) And in light of Mr. Durst’s arrest on Saturday in the 2000 murder of his friend Susan Berman — one of three deaths or disappearances to which he’s been connected — it raised, or heightened, some questions.

Did the series’s investigative coup — a writing sample that strongly appears to link Mr. Durst to a key piece of evidence in the Berman case — play a role in the decision to arrest him? Did the possible confession? (It was taped nearly three years ago but accidentally discovered just nine months ago.) If so, was it just a lucky accident for HBO and Mr. Jarecki that the arrest was perfectly timed to bring publicity to the finale? Investigators said they were worried that Mr. Durst would flee, but still, it was a jaw-dropping coincidence. Appropriate, perhaps, given the way Mr. Durst and his lawyers have spent years dismissing powerful circumstantial evidence as, well, coincidence. (Read our interview with Mr. Jarecki here.)

There seems to be little doubt now, in the aftermath, that “The Jinx” played a crucial role in Mr. Durst’s arrest (and in any future punishment), whether through actual evidence gathering or simply through refocusing attention on his bizarre, decades-long case. And that suggests a more profound, probably unanswerable, question, which is whether Mr. Durst’s cooperation with Mr. Jarecki meant that he wanted at some level to be caught. By the time of the interview depicted in the finale, he was experienced in wearing microphones — in an earlier episode, it was pointed out to him when his mumbled remarks were accidentally recorded. Did he really not know that he was walking away from the most important interview of his life wearing a live mic?

Much of the finale focused, in a striking way, on Mr. Jarecki and his fellow producers, who filmed themselves as they prepped for the interview at which they would confront Mr. Durst with the handwriting evidence. They planned the way you imagine the police prepare for an interrogation or a lawyer for a cross-examination, and other journalists and documentarians may worry that they gave too much away — what interview subject will let himself be ambushed after seeing that?

The episode reflected the extent to which “The Jinx,” especially in its later stages, became the story of Mr. Jarecki’s journey as much as Mr. Durst’s guilt or innocence. While it built toward the interview and the bathroom shocker, it also had a valedictory quality, as some of the characters we met through the six episodes — lawyers, family members of the victims, reporters, policemen — reflected on the long, strange course of events since the disappearance of Mr. Durst’s first wife, Kathleen, in 1982. Mr. Jarecki admitted his sympathy for the strangely folksy and disarming Mr. Durst: “I like the guy.”

“The Jinx” was, in a sense, a very elaborate and relatively well-financed version of the sort of true-crime reconstructions that cable television has been doing for several decades now. But within that context it was top of class in its artfulness. You might not have been comfortable, from a journalistic standpoint, with its frequent use of recreations — such as a shot of a crime scene representing Ms. Berman’s corpse lying on the floor of her Beverly Hills home, surrounded by small, bloody paw prints — but they were the best recreations you’d seen. And the cheesy mood-setting shots endemic to true crime weren’t cheesy here — a slow pan in Episode 4 across an endless shelf of wig mannequins, illustrating a point about Mr. Durst’s use of disguise, was hypnotic and beautiful.

There may be reasons larger than recreations (or the possible entrapment of Mr. Durst) to be disturbed by the artistic and, possibly, prosecutorial success of “The Jinx.” It was unusual for focusing on an unsolved collection of cases with a single, living, cooperating subject, and it was hard not to sense a presumption of guilt throughout the series, no matter how even-handed and objective Mr. Jarecki might have tried to be. Nearly everything we saw weighed against Mr. Durst, in terms of evidence, emotions, drama — there wasn’t a credible moment that pointed toward his innocence. We’ve become accustomed to the notion of the Innocence Project that frees the wrongly convicted; “The Jinx” was a guilt project.

In the finale Mr. Jarecki, talking to his crew, said that the No. 1 goal was to “get justice, such as we can get in this case.” But if that were true, then goal 1A was to make a riveting piece of television, and Mr. Jarecki’s method of getting justice — just like a lawyer or a prosecutor — was to construct a convincing narrative of the case. That’s easier to do when you can stage recreations, choose your music (like the opening theme song by the band Eels with its line “I need fresh blood”), construct a flashy drama-like credits sequence and circle through your story several times, revealing information in strategic layers. But it’s not easy to do this well.

And of course “The Jinx” would never have happened without Mr. Durst’s desire, against all better judgment, to go on camera and be a part of telling his own story. Presumably the attention drawn by “The Jinx” and “Serial” will lead to more of these deep investigatory projects, putting more pressure on public officials to re-examine cases, and questions will grow regarding which cases get this kind of attention. But few of them will benefit from as engrossing a star as Mr. Durst, with his tics, his weirdly gentle forcefulness and, when the chips were down, his nervous burps.