The Staircase

A new true-crime series explores an unexplained 2001 death – but how does it compare to the gripping 2004 documentary of the same crime, asks Caryn James.

There is even a third audience of people fascinated enough by the case to go down a rabbit hole of research. He planned to use the Peterson case to examine the justice system from both the prosecution's and the defence's points of view. The fictional version, for example, depicts Jean-Xavier (Vincent Vermignon) and his producer in Paris searching for the subject of their next film. We come to see that he is a proven liar, who falsely claimed during a campaign for public office that he had won a Purple Heart for serving in Vietnam. Lying, of course, doesn't make him a killer. Sophie Turner is a strong presence as Margaret, the older of the two daughters Peterson adopted after their mother died (that's a whole other subplot and piece of evidence). Tim Guinee plays Peterson's loyal brother, Bill, thoroughly convincing us they could be siblings. It starts in 2017 when Peterson is about to go to court to finalise his plea, and quickly goes back to December 2001 when he makes a frantic emergency call, saying that his wife is unconscious. In one of the best fictional scenes, Kathleen angrily calls him "the great dissembler", capable of deflecting and talking his way out of almost anything. Throughout, the show flashes back to Kathleen and their family life, and forward to his legal battle. In 2013 and 2017, De Lestrade made two sequels, chronicling Peterson's release after eight years in prison and the plea deal that set him free for good. The defence said they had a lovely marriage and she died in a fall down a sharply-angled staircase. A reasonable conclusion, after watching the documentary, is that there are holes in both arguments. A scattershot structure and a couple of underwritten major characters, including Kathleen (Toni Collette) and Peterson's attorney, David Rudolf (Michael Stuhlbarg), make the show less taut and suspenseful than a crime story should be.

Here's everything you need to know about the true story behind HBO Max's The Staircase, which details the tragic death of Kathleen Peterson.

He was released from custody with credit for the seven-plus years he'd already spent behind bars. Days after Kathleen's death on Dec. 9, 2001, Michael was charged with murder. Michael and Kathleen met in 1986. Following the deaths of both George and Elizabeth, Michael became the guardian of their two children. Though authorities initially considered the death accidental, the autopsy report later led investigators to believe that Kathleen died not after a fall but after being attacked. The night before, the two had been celebrating with drinks by the pool after learning that Michael's latest book, a WW II-era tale based on a true story, was being optioned by a Hollywood studio.

The new drama takes a wider look at the phenomenon of 'The Staircase', inspired by the 2004 documentary.

The law says he did play a part in his wife’s death, but that sliver of doubt casts an unignorable shadow over The Staircase. True crime can sometimes feel predatory – a way to dig up old pain for the sake of entertainment – but Michael’s trial and the subsequent series invites viewers to engage with the topic on a more introspective level. Now, for the first time, the case has been dramatised in a new HBO Max series – showing in the UK on Sky Atlantic and Now – The Staircase. Michael became close with the filmmakers over the years, and as each new instalment of his story raked over evidence and peeled back the layers of his personality, doubt over whether he had a hand in his wife’s death grew. That we are still obsessed with the death of Kathleen Peterson comes down to the mastery of the storytelling it has inspired. The gruesome image is one of the first shocking pieces of evidence shown in The Staircase, the 2004 documentary series that is often credited with kickstarting the true crime boom that has gripped readers and viewers over the last two decades. A well-made, balanced courtroom drama, The Staircase revealed a man wracked with grief, yet strangely charismatic – a joker and a family man, accused of the worst crime imaginable.

There are many levels to "The Staircase," a drama as much about the making of the docuseries chronicling Michael Peterson's murder trial as the salacious ...

There's also the issue of how prosecutors leveraged that information, recognizing how it might play to a jury in 2003. (Netflix, notably, revisited the original 2004 series in 2018 The result is a production that constantly seems to be reassessing what we know, versus what we might think or assume, about what transpired.

Antonio Campos and Maggie Cohn spoke with Variety about adapting the seminal true crime series for HBO Max.

So that was always fun and was always in the forefront of the situations that we decided to put her in. So talking to people that worked with her, neighbors, friends, we started to construct a version of Kathleen. At the end of the day, this is a dramatized version of Kathleen based on a lot of things that we knew happened to Kathleen Peterson, that we knew Kathleen Peterson did and the kind of person she was. Ultimately, what we wanted to show is that people are capable of all sorts of things and to see something in themselves in him, as well. We knew how he spoke about it, and the ease with which he spoke about it, which was also a big part of what was fascinating in the documentary. CAMPOS: We anticipated that there are going to be people that jump on us about certain things, or want to put up a magnifying glass on certain parts of the story, and that’s fine. The discourse wasn’t happening, and that was part of the tension in the family. The world that the story starts off with in 2001 is very different from the world that Michael Peterson is in in 2017. No matter what the jury said afterwards, which is that they didn’t take that into consideration, we all know that they heard it and that it affected their perspective of Michael Peterson and that the D.A. knew that that would be the case. I want to get into something that really blew me away in the series, which was the aspect of queerness that comes through Michael Peterson, but also in so many other characters. They were there, they were part of the fabric of the story. That just feels like the best way to try and represent what is a very complicated series of events. The series pioneered a new, episodic style of gripping documentary storytelling, and in real-time revealed the details of Kathleen’s death, Michael’s trial and its aftermath, becoming an object of cult fascination that persists to this day.

The eight-part series follows the trial of Michael Peterson who was convicted of murdering his wife.

The Peterson's neighbour suggested that the injuries on Kathleen's scalp were consistent with being attacked by a barred owl. Back in December 2001 novelist Michael Peterson called 911 to report that his wife had fallen down the stairs, suggesting it was due to her alcohol and Valium intake - though toxicology reports later disproved that. The biological daughter of Kathleen from a previous relationship, Caitlin Atwater famously distanced herself from her stepfather and sided with the prosecution. Mrs Peterson is played by Toni Collette, fresh off the back of critical acclaim thanks to her roles in Hereditary, Knives Out, Nightmare Alley, as well as recent Netflix hit Pieces of Her. It depicts how Kathleen's death rapidly becomes a murder case as twists in the tale unravel. Sky Atlantic's new drama, The Staircase is set to air this week.

The prime suspect in HBO Max's new murder mystery may be played by Colin Firth, but that doesn't automatically mean he's innocent.

And what to make of the 2017 timeline? Mike paints a rosy, too-good-to-be-true portrait of his marriage and yet, earlier in the episode, he makes a date to meet a man at an airport hotel. The DA presents them to Kathleen’s sisters, along with a theory of her murder. Their daughter – the youngest of five in their blended family – was about to start university, and the nest was empty. There’s more to the story, of course. Blunt force trauma requires a second person to supply the force. Is a woman who drinks too much at parties – at a recent shindig, Kathy jumped fully clothed into their pool and hurt her neck – more likely to miss the top stair? Kathleen is a matriarch in the grand tradition of the American South, which is to say she serves dinner with her good pearls on. This is a series with something to say about the knotty, illusory nature of truth, I’m sure. If the title of The Staircase feels naggingly familiar, that’s because it’s also the title of a documentary series based on the exact same crime. But to announce that your miniseries is in conversation with the actual Holy Bible before the cold open? The bulk of the episode takes place back in 2001.

How did The Staircase filmmakers' relationship with Michael affect the original 2004 docuseries? HBO Max's adaptation attempts to find out with a meta story ...

“The problem with any subject, as Maggie said, is that once you put on the camera, are you getting the real person?” adds Campos. “Are you getting someone performing? Playing devil’s advocate, Campos counters, “And I would argue that a good documentarian has to get close to a subject, to a certain degree, to get them to open up. Asked whether Campos had conversations about filmmaker-subject distance with de Lestrade, Campos says, “I think that Jean would argue that he was able to maintain his distance enough to know when Michael was putting on a show for the camera and when he felt like he was being more genuine. I got a very small taste of what that’s like to try to keep up that boundary…it’s very difficult, or it was for me.” I mean, I was in a three-hour conversation and I was struggling with it,” says Cohn. “So imagine, over the course of two years, trying to keep that separation and that distance when you’re so intimately connected. The fireplace tool, which mysteriously reappeared after an extensive search, was central to an episode in the original series titled “The Blowpoke Returns.” But Campos said that seeing the uncut footage from that plot twist gave him additional insight into Michael, who is played on the new miniseries by Colin Firth.

The notorious documentary series about the death of an author's wife gets a star-packed fictionalisation that is practically fizzing with tension.

The former is slippery and arrogant, putting in a performance that teeters on so many brinks – deeply loving yet coercive with family, paralysed with grief yet sociopathically detached, self-indulgent yet narcissistic – that you cannot help watching to see if and which way he will fall. As evidence against Michael grows – if not probative of murder, then at least of the fact that he is not quite the man they thought he was – the family begins to fracture. It skates close to becoming disorientating – particularly when Lestrade (Vincent Vermignon) and his documentary team turn up to make their film – but the timeline-hopping generally adds to the growing tension. The subsequent investigation revealed a millefeuille of layers to the man, the family and the story. Then we move back again to a few months before, when Michael, Kathleen (Toni Collette) and their children/wards (one from Kathleen’s previous relationship, four from Michael’s) have gathered for a family dinner and college send-off for one of them. He claimed he found her at the foot of the stairs she had fallen down while drunk and cradled her as he called the emergency services and she breathed her last.

This HBO dramatisation of the popular Netflix documentary keeps you hooked with its central mystery: did Michael Peterson kill his wife?

Early on, we see a re-enactment of the scenario put forward by the defence experts: Kathleen tripping on a stair, hitting her head on the wall, briefly coming back to consciousness and hitting her head again, spreading blood around as she did so. But he does convey something of Peterson’s strangeness, his blase reactions as fresh revelations start piling up (he was having gay liaisons; a woman he had been close to many years earlier was also found dead at the foot of the stairs). He comes across as untrustworthy, and it’s testament to Firth’s acting that he doesn’t overdo this in the manner of a shifty villain in a second-rate thriller. If you’re a Netflix subscriber and a fan of true-crime documentaries, you may well have watched The Staircase (Sky Atlantic). It is the story of American writer Michael Peterson, who dialled 911 one night to report that his wife had fallen down the stairs at their North Carolina home.

HBO's new Sky Atlantic drama has reignited interest in the Mr and Mrs Peterson murder case.

Mr Peterson was the last person to see her alive. A friend of the Petersons in Germany, her body was found at the bottom of a staircase with a coroner deeming her death to have been as a result of a haemorrhage, which caused her to fall down the stairs. The Petersons had dinner with Ratliff and her daughters that night, but Mr Peterson stayed to help put her children to bed. A case which saw twists unravel and revelations unveiled, Mr Peterson was ultimately convicted of his wife's murder after finding her at the bottom of the family home's stairs. This is despite Kathleen and her children she had with Michael reportedly accepting his sexuality. It concluded she had died from blood loss ninety minutes to two hours after sustaining the injuries.

For almost two decades, true crime fans have been fascinated by the fate of Kathleen Peterson, whose death was examined in a groundbreaking documentary ...

The show’s creator, de Lestrade, told Digital Spy in 2018: “Now, the judge has given the final answer, and nobody can come back to that. Peterson, who insists that he is innocent to this day, was convicted of murdering Kathleen in 2001 and sentenced to life in prison. The launch of The Staircase (2022) on HBO Max in the US and Sky Atlantic/NOW in the UK is sure to reignite interest in the documentary series that first brought the case to international attention.