the staircase movie review

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, hbo's the staircase is a masterful, stark true crime epic.

When David Fincher directed “ Gone Girl ,” a lot of hubbub was made about how he redesigned the interior of Gillian Flynn ’s twisty airplane-ready novel into something more decadent, but just as addictive. Antonio Campos has accomplished more or less the same invigorating feat with HBO’s new miniseries “The Staircase,” which treats a true crime story with an incredible sense of style, urgency, and vision, all in support of a juicy, mega narrative that lives or dies on the integrity of its storyteller. “The Staircase” is both a masterful moment for an assured filmmaker, and it's the jolt that the true crime storytelling industry needs.

Created and directed by Campos ( Leigh Janiak directed two later episodes not offered to press), “The Staircase” is an American gothic about the modern family, which in this case includes many conflicted step-siblings, wealthy parents with secrets, and giant splatters of blood at the bottom of a stairwell, dried into their Durham, North Carolina home as if it were always part of the wallpaper. Colin Firth stars in the series as Michael Peterson , who at the beginning of the series is accused of murder when his wife Kathleen ( Toni Collette ) is found dead at said stairs, covered in her blood, with extreme head trauma that suggests a beating. It’s far from an open-and-shut battle for justice, on either side of the courthouse.

The mystery creates an immense divide between the extended family, including the children from Michael’s past marriages, who have always known him in a certain light. Michael has a history of manipulating people, and making some big lies—like that he received a Purple Heart in combat, a lie that blew up in his face and haunts his current run for City Council. And it becomes clear that while Michael may or may not have been a murderer, he has other private manners he's only carefully shared with his closest circles. But how his loved ones see him might be able to help his image, like how his daughters are urged by his lawyer ( Michael Stuhlbarg ) to speak in front of the cameras. The children in "The Staircase" (played by Odessa Young , Dane DeHaan , Patrick Schwarzenegger , Sophie Turner , and Olivia DeJonge ) visibly suffer for the sins of their parents, in public, and the quiet, former shell of their home.

But "The Staircase" takes the domestic tension even further, by reckoning with how we largely know about this event, focusing on the 2004 documentary that was made by French filmmakers led by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade. "The Staircase" as a Russian doll saga is not just the possible murder, it’s how it became a story that was bent and revealed and protected, depending on who was telling it. The French angle is more and more integrated into the story (how perfect, given Campos’ French wannabe character study “ Simon Killer ”), but it also creates a revealing dynamic as the doc filmmakers stand in for the audience. Sitting at a diner, they analyze what they’ve just filmed, recreating the banter that comes with watching these stories. When they're inside the Peterson home, they alter the entire atmosphere, for us to see how a camera makes all the difference in how the truth comes out.

Casting is an essential part of the process for an ensemble like this, and Campos stretches his many striking actors to points where the performances are unrecognizable and challenging. Firth takes his usually congenial, calm screen presence and shows us its flip side, that of being indignant, slippery, and clumsy, like if a Eugene Levy character in a Christopher Guest movie were accused of first-degree murder. But with the framing of the entire story introducing Michael to us in both the year of the murder, 2001 and as a free man in 2017, Firth withholds the conscience of his character, while showing the explosive emotional needs of his character. He’s incredibly hard to read, and just as fascinating to watch.

“The Staircase” subtly brings out great performances from other heavyweights, while giving many of them a distinct look: the series’ hair and make-up efforts make familiar faces like Rosemarie DeWitt , Juliette Binoche , and Parker Posey bizarrely difficult to recognize, paired with the cinematography’s high contrast lighting and pervasive shadows. (It’s not always raining in this show but it might as well be indoors.) Campos creates an uncanniness that draws you in more, and then he blocks numerous gruesome living room and kitchen table dialogue scenes so specifically, you can watch any character’s reaction to another and see a certain story that has been unspoken. The ensemble work in this series is a veritable feast, of calibrated performances, framing and editing, scene after scene.

It all becomes a part of the sumptuous, meticulous nature of this tale that has a horror movie's ominous nature, and sometimes jolts you with dissonant strings from Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans , or an operatic (if sometimes indulgent) needle drop, or makes time for gorgeous, composed shots of styrofoam skulls that have been bashed in and covered in red corn syrup as part of the Durham DA’s desperate investigation. And in capturing so many different perspectives, it’s not uncommon for Campos to be visually unpredictable by jumping between timelines, just by shuffling one era of people out of the front door and having another era enter it, as he does with the Peterson home, showing its two lives as a socialite hub and a crime scene.

The humanity in “The Staircase” is always in the starkness, and Campos gets to its uncomfortable depths in darkly comic ways—during an Empty Nester Party at the Peterson home in a flashback, Kathleen gets drunk and jumps off-frame into a swimming pool, only to injure herself; her subsequent neck brace becomes foreshadowing about the latest injury that might befall her. Kathleen’s story is given a great deal of love by Collette's embrace of her idiosyncrasies, and makes for its harrowing plot about what she was worried about up to the days of her death. She then portrays a grueling (possible) accident reenactment that shows just how visceral, head-slamming stuntwork and editing can make for a show-stopping sequence, albeit of the most cryptic kind.

Campos has always had a sense of this cryptic as a storyteller (with "Christine" and "Afterschool") but to see it play across multiple hour-long episodes, in a form that welcomes a low standard, is absolutely exhilarating. There is no passive, distancing nature to “The Staircase,” despite how true crime regularly lets us treat other families’ horror stories like car accidents we pass on the highway. Campos’ version of must-watch entertainment is about making us sit in the wreckage. And it is beautiful.

Four episodes were screened for review. "The Staircase" premieres on HBO Max tomorrow, May 5th.

Nick Allen is the former Senior Editor at RogerEbert.com and a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

Latest blog posts

Ape Shall Not Kill Ape: A Look at the Entire Apes Franchise

Criterion Celebrates the Films That Forever Shifted Our Perception of Kristen Stewart

The Estate of George Carlin Destroys AI George Carlin in Victory for Copyright Protection (and Basic Decency)

The Future of the Movies, Part 3: Fathom Events CEO Ray Nutt

Latest reviews.

Simon Abrams

The Old Oak

Matt zoller seitz.

Girls State

The People's Joker

Clint worthington.

Mary & George

Cristina escobar.

Sheila O'Malley

Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission.

The Staircase Defies Expectations

Many of us have seen The Staircase before. Specifically, we saw it in the form of the 2004 docuseries that tracked the complicated murder case against Michael Peterson, a North Carolina writer accused of killing his wife, Kathleen. That version of The Staircase was a foundational work of modern true-crime television, providing unusually intimate access to the accused and capturing wild twist after wild twist. It spawned a sequel in 2013 and three additional installments commissioned by Netflix in 2018. Without The Staircase , one could argue, shows like The Jinx and Making a Murderer might never have existed.

That’s why this new The Staircase , an eight-part limited series whose first three episodes are now on HBO Max, seemed potentially unnecessary. Even though retelling true-crime stories in scripted form is all the rage this year , and has been done quite a bit in the past, it’s hard to imagine gleaning something new from a subject that’s already been explored via multiple hours of television.

But The Staircase , which casts Colin Firth in the role of Michael and Toni Collette as Kathleen, defies expectations, adding new perspective and dimension to a well-known story while creating an experience that differs from the docuseries. Where the original focused on Michael’s journey and the nitty-gritty legal maneuverings in his case, this iteration widens its canvas enough to register as both a crime drama and a family drama. Perhaps more important, The Staircase enables the audience to see Kathleen as a full human being who once lived a rich, not entirely fulfilling life as opposed to a victim whose body becomes yet another piece of evidence in court.

Showrunners Maggie Cohn and Antonio Campos include a notable aspect of the story that the original, for obvious reasons, could not, casting some of the makers of the documentary as characters. That gives this series the opportunity to interrogate how true crime itself shapes opinion by nudging the audience’s sympathies in one direction or another. In part, this is a limited series about the making of a docuseries and the inevitable biases that arise from being so closely embedded with a man who insists he’s innocent even though certain details don’t square with that assertion.

Certainly The Staircase revisits material that is familiar, sometimes recreating scenes from the documentary shot for shot. Once again, for example, Mike leads the film crew on a tour of his lovely, spacious home to retrace the events of December 9, 2001, the night Kathleen died after enjoying some wine by the pool with her husband and then heading back inside. Michael contends he came back in the house roughly a half-hour later to find his wife lying at the bottom of some stairs, having taken a rough fall. But the amount of blood at the scene and the ensuing discovery of lacerations on Kathleen’s scalp, among other things, suggest her husband may have directly caused her death. The one thing that cannot be denied is the only people who know exactly what happened are Michael, who may not be trustworthy, and Kathleen, who’s no longer able to speak for herself.

Flashbacks to events prior to that December shed more light on who Kathleen was, presumably with a few dashes of artistic license. As portrayed here, she’s an executive at Nortel who’s stressed about layoffs at the company in the months before her death as well as a mother accustomed to playing the primary caregiving role for her extended brood. Together, she and Michael have five children — two sons from his previous marriage, Clayton (Dane DeHaan) and Todd (Patrick Schwarzenegger); a daughter from hers, Caitlin (Olivia DeJonge); and two daughters, Margaret (Sophie Turner) and Martha (Odessa Young), whom Michael adopted after they lost both of their birth parents. Kathleen strives to be the glue between them and the woman who has it all, but it’s obvious how badly she needs to soften her edges with wine and pills. As played by Collette, she always seems slightly rattled but also radiates real warmth that makes it obvious why others want to be in her presence. The sense of loss following her death resonates much more than it does in the docuseries.

While other Peterson family members appeared in the first Staircase , this one spends more time exploring the dynamics between the Peterson kids and the extended family, particularly Kathleen’s sisters, Candace (Rosemarie DeWitt) and Lori (Maria Dizzia), who become increasingly convinced Michael took their sibling from them. Slowly, beneath what looks at first like a happy, stitched-together family, the show reveals rifts and resentments, hidden lacerations of another kind.

The focus on character development, not usually a hallmark of true crime, extends to every person touched by this case, including Peterson’s attorney, David Rudolf, a role handled authoritatively by Michael Stuhlbarg, and prosecutors Jim Hardin (Cullen Moss) and Freda Black, played with quiet command by Parker Posey, who nails her North Carolina drawl. (Someone give Posey her own series about a progressive attorney fighting for justice in the South, please.) No one in this series is one-dimensional or easily reduced to hero or villain.

That applies to no one more than Firth, who rises to the challenge of becoming Michael Peterson by adopting his matter-of-fact and elevated manner of speaking with great precision. As is noted in the original Staircase , Michael is openly bisexual, and that is explored with greater sensitivity and detail here, making his sexual orientation another piece of an intricate puzzle as opposed to a hint that that he’s a deviant. While Firth effectively captures Michael’s mood swings and flashes of anger, he doesn’t quite match the real Peterson’s odd vibes; he does connect completely, though, with Peterson’s low-key arrogance and ongoing love affair with the sound of his own voice.

The procedural aspects of the story are still fully represented (for those wondering, the first five episodes provided to critics suggest that, yes, the owl theory will be covered), making for an occasionally grisly viewing experience; upsetting autopsy photos and discussions of blood spatters could make The Staircase a tough sit for the squeamish. But nothing here feels gratuitous. Campos and Cohn are ultimately most interested in the truth, how it can be manipulated, and the ripple effects those manipulations can have on the members of a family for years. Is the riddle of Michael Peterson or this case solved by the end of this Staircase ? Probably not. But the perspectives and narrative pathways explored in this limited series prove that the story of Michael and Kathleen Peterson remains compelling no matter how many times you’ve seen or heard it.

vulture section lede
vulture homepage lede
the staircase
colin firth
toni collette

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

What is your email.

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

Lower case letters (a-z)
Upper case letters (A-Z)
Numbers (0-9)
Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.

Entertainment
HBO Max’s <em>The Staircase</em> Is So Much More Than a Rehash of the Classic True-Crime Docuseries

HBO Max’s The Staircase Is So Much More Than a Rehash of the Classic True-Crime Docuseries

D on’t come to The Staircase expecting certainty. French filmmaker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s Peabody-winning documentary series , which originally aired in 2004, with updates added in 2013 and 2018, is a study in ambiguity. Across 13 episodes, it traces the long legal saga of Michael Peterson, an author charged with murder after his wife Kathleen died on the staircase of their Durham, N.C. home in December 2001 in what Peterson claimed was an accidental fall. Combining vérité-style footage with one-on-one interviews, Lestrade depicts an American justice system so labyrinthine, inept and corrupt, it might be incapable of establishing anything beyond a reasonable doubt. Rather than inching closer to some definitive truth, he keeps circling around to the same impasse: Peterson couldn’t have done it, but he must have done it.

HBO Max’s The Staircase , an astute scripted miniseries from The Devil All the Time filmmaker Antonio Campos that debuts May 5, is similarly wary of easy answers. At first, as Campos restages the immediate aftermath of Kathleen’s death, it looks as though we’re in for yet another redundant docudrama that fictionalizes events that will already be familiar to most viewers. There turns out to be a lot more than that happening in this Staircase , which not only revisits the Michael Peterson trial, but also encompasses the making of the documentary and explores aspects of the family’s story that never made it into that series. With additional context comes an even greater sense that no secondhand account of what happened on that staircase—whether generated by the prosecution, the defense, or Lestrade—will ever approach the objective truth.

The linchpin of this delicate portrayal is Colin Firth ’s performance as Michael. Best known for playing romantic leads and other charismatic types, he disappears, here, into a far murkier character. In Lestrade’s series, which fascinated Firth , Peterson comes off as a series of near-contradictions: an erudite, introspective author and a belligerent narcissist; a devoted family man sneaking around with potential male lovers; a community leader and a true oddball. Firth captures everything from his halting speech patterns to his flashes of anger, disappearing deep enough into the character that (unlike Viola Davis as Michelle Obama in The First Lady or Jared Leto as Adam Neumann in WeCrashed ) the casting never feels like a gimmick. Neither evil nor especially likable, his version of Michael clearly has a dark side. The question is: how dark?

Liberated from the constraints of the documentary format, this Staircase digs into characters its predecessor didn’t have the access to fully explore—essentially, everyone besides Michael and his unflappable defense attorney, David Rudolf (a perfectly cast Michael Stuhlbarg). Campos teases out the complexities of the Petersons’ big, blended family; while the couple had no children together, both partners brought kids from previous marriages, plus Michael’s two adopted daughters (Sophie Turner and Odessa Young). In this telling, it’s the dynamic between young-adult siblings and step-siblings, that accounts for their split allegiances. Kathleen’s only biological offspring, Caitlin (Olivia DeJonge), is coaxed out of the Peterson fold and into the thrall of Michael’s nemesis, Kathleen’s sister Candace (the always-captivating Rosemarie DeWitt ). But that doesn’t mean the other four kids, rounded out by Michael’s troubled sons (Dane DeHaan and Patrick Schwarzenegger), are equally comfortable supporting their dad.

For obvious reasons, Lestrade couldn’t offer Kathleen’s perspective, and he has been accused , with some merit , of writing her out of her own story. In flashbacks that draw on interviews with people who knew her, independent research, imaginative hypotheses, and an uncommonly subtle performance from Toni Collette , Campos assembles a convincing composite portrait. The Kathleen we meet is intelligent, warm, capable—the kind of woman for whom “having it all” means being on call 24/7 for a corporate job, catering to the every need of her demanding husband and children, then taking a pill to get her stressed-out body to sleep. Whether or not she could have known about, let alone accepted, her husband’s extramarital flirtations (or more) with men, as Michael claims she did, becomes another of the series’ big questions. Although the multiple graphic set pieces that dramatize various theories of how Kathleen died struck me as excessively invasive, for the most part, the flashbacks work to restore her personhood.

For more of TIME’s culture coverage, subscribe to our entertainment newsletter, More to the Story, by clicking here .

The final piece of Campos’ mosaic follows Lestrade (Vincent Vermignon) and producer Denis Poncet (Frank Feys) as they navigate—and debate—how to portray Michael’s ordeal. Privy to Rudolf’s strategy sessions as well as some of the Petersons’ tensest moments, but denied behind-the-scenes access to the prosecution, Jean struggles to find balance. At the same time, he must keep viewers invested by incorporating the elements of suspense and surprise that have, in the wake of the original Staircase , fueled an endless thirst for true crime. Even before the documentary crew becomes personally invested in the outcome of Michael’s case, there’s an agenda at work beyond offering a fly-on-the-wall view of the American justice system. In the HBO Max series’ standout fourth episode, Campos’ camera zooms in on both the editing process and the recording of Jocelyn Pook’s mournful score, demonstrating how each element of a story, whether fiction or nonfiction, represents a choice made to elicit an emotional reaction.

When we meet Jean and Denis, in episode 2, they are in a Paris cafe throwing around ideas for a follow-up to their Oscar-winning 2001 film, Murder on a Sunday Morning . “This is our moment,” Denis tells his collaborator, in French. “The world is looking at us. We need our next film. What do you want to show them?” Jean contemplates the question for a few beats. “I want to show something strong,” he replies, in a clumsy bit of dialogue. “About justice, but how it truly is. With the defense, prosecution, judge—all saying different things about the same crime.”

Could Lestrade’s statement of purpose have become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Quite possibly. But as he followed the Petersons, there’s no doubt that he also encountered truly unanticipated holes, inconsistencies, self-interested stakeholders or other inexplicable details connected with every scenario floated to explain Kathleen’s death. His Staircase captures the senselessness of a justice system that, regardless of whether Peterson was guilty or innocent, spent the better part of two decades teasing, tormenting and helping to impoverish a whole family—and one that entered the courtroom with far more privilege than that of most criminal defendants.

By expanding the frame to include the making of the documentary, Campos goes a step farther, putting forth an idea that should challenge the legion of amateur detectives who’ve spent years speculating about this case and others, online and off. Sometimes, this Staircase suggests, no amount of additional context will get you closer to the truth. Sometimes, in true crime and beyond, there’s simply no getting around the fundamental unknowability of the human soul.

More Must-Reads From TIME

Jane Fonda Champions Climate Action for Every Generation
Passengers Are Flying up to 30 Hours to See Four Minutes of the Eclipse
Biden’s Campaign Is In Trouble. Will the Turnaround Plan Work?
Essay: The Complicated Dread of Early Spring
Why Walking Isn’t Enough When It Comes to Exercise
The Financial Influencers Women Actually Want to Listen To
The Best TV Shows to Watch on Peacock
Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

The Staircase

TV Mini Series

Tells the story of Michael Peterson, a crime novelist accused of killing his wife Kathleen after she is found dead at the bottom of a staircase in their home, and the 16-year judicial battle... Read all Tells the story of Michael Peterson, a crime novelist accused of killing his wife Kathleen after she is found dead at the bottom of a staircase in their home, and the 16-year judicial battle that followed. Tells the story of Michael Peterson, a crime novelist accused of killing his wife Kathleen after she is found dead at the bottom of a staircase in their home, and the 16-year judicial battle that followed.

Antonio Campos
Colin Firth
Toni Collette
Michael Stuhlbarg
216 User reviews
33 Critic reviews
1 win & 38 nominations total

"The Staircase" Cast Explain How They Found Truth in Their Characters

Michael Peterson

David Rudolf

Todd Peterson

Margaret Ratliff

Martha Ratliff

Clayton Peterson

Bill Peterson

Jean-Xavier

Sophie Broussard

Caitlin Atwater

Candace Zamperini

Freda Black

Lori Campbell

Ron Guerette
Art Holland

All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

Did you know

Trivia Harrison Ford was originally attached to star as Michael Peterson but dropped out and was replaced by Colin Firth .
Goofs In what is supposed to be the Durham County Courthouse, a map of Raleigh appears on the wall. Raleigh is in neighboring Wake County.
Connections Featured in Jeremy Vine: Episode #5.105 (2022)

User reviews 216

cathyannemoore-66196
May 14, 2022
How many seasons does The Staircase have? Powered by Alexa
May 5, 2022 (United States)
United States
Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Annapurna Television
See more company credits at IMDbPro

Technical specs

Runtime 1 hour 5 minutes
Dolby Digital
Dolby Atmos

More to explore

The Staircase Review: Was It Murder, Or An Accident?

Colin Firth stars in The Staircase, a true crime story about a novelist whose wife is found dead.

On an unassuming street in the historic district of Forest Hills, Durham, California, Kathleen Peterson is found unconscious at the foot of her home’s staircase. The year is 2001, and it is only fifteen days before Christmas. She is forty-eight years old and is announced dead on arrival, but her family, and her husband, insist that it was an accident and not a murder. Her husband is the American novelist Michael Peterson, best known for his works based on his time in Vietnam, where he worked with the US Department of Defense.

As the autopsy report comes out, suspicion arises about the circumstances of Kathleen’s death, and her husband is arrested as the prime suspect in a potential homicide case. With Peterson’s arrest comes a series of sensationalized events, especially as details from his private life come to light. Peterson lied about the circumstances around his military service and career, while he also harbored a secret that could have torn apart his marriage: he was bisexual and amid an affair. Peterson is declared guilty in court and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Sixteen years later, after the initial court case, Peterson’s case has renewed itself. In 2011, Peterson was allowed the opportunity to be placed under house arrest instead of serving time in prison. Then in 2017, he used the Alford Plea to try and lessen his sentencing. Interest in his case specifically began to rise in the public interest when Netflix added the thirteen-part documentary series The Staircase on the streaming platform. Filmed over fourteen years, it tracks the Michael Peterson case as new developments emerged and disappeared.

A Murder on a Staircase

Now, in 2022, HBO Max’s dramatized version of The Staircase adds to the plethora of new true crime shows seen across platforms. While popular shows like Inventing Anna and The Dropout have taken to shifting towards the feminine side of true crime, The Staircase leads more into the territory of past true crime shows: its central figure, Michael Peterson, is a male figure, head of household, and a writer writing about countries he has seen through the American military complex. He is a familiar figure in the overarching mythos of American television and entertainment, except Peterson is now the prime suspect.

The show was developed by Antonio Campos, the director of movies like Afterschool and The Devil All the Time . He was inspired by the documentary series The Staircase in 2008, but this passion project did not find a home until 2019. Harrison Ford was once attached to the project as an executive producer and as an actor, but he ended up dropping out due to unspecified reasons. HBO Max ordered the series to run as an eight-episode limited series for their streaming platform, and the first three episodes were released years later in May 2022.

Colin Firth stars in The Staircase as Michael Peterson, the novelist who initially calls 911 to report that his wife had fallen down the stairs. In the series’ dramatic opening scene, a black scene with a voiceover immediately establishes that something has gone wrong. Peterson’s frantic voice exclaims that his wife has fallen down the steps, then the camera moves its gaze to the crime scene. The son comes home to find the house in disarray, his father in shock and throwing his body over his bloody wife’s corpse.

“She was drunk,” he claims later, defying the police’s orders to stop tampering with the house and corpse, now a crime scene. Kathleen’s (Toni Collette) body sprawls across the floor, the walls and torso splattered with blood. The Staircase does not bother to hide the brutality of this crime. It instead lingers immediately on questions about how this could have possibly been a fall down the stairs. Peterson’s act feels rehearsed, casting further suspicion on what went on here.

The bulk of the first episode shifts between past and present, offering a stark juxtaposition of the family’s life before the tragedy tore everything apart. Sparsely placed timestamps provide a sense of placement every so often, but, instead, the show follows a nonlinear trajectory that bounces as it sees fit. It is a tentative slow burn, dragging a bit in the first episodes then picks up its pace as the story escalates. As the viewer’s gaze shifts from the ongoing investigation with the DA’s office to the Peterson family, it provides an ominous nature even in moments of solace.

Related: Operation Mincemeat: Plot, Cast, and Everything Else We Know

Colin Firth Delivers One of His Best Roles

Colin Firth and Toni Collette mustered striking performances as Michael and Kathleen Peterson. Firth’s Peterson is difficult to get a read on, and it seems like one may never be able to understand the extent of what he is thinking. On the other hand, Collette’s Kathleen is introduced as a dead body, but when the story weaves past and present, she can come to life vibrantly, showing that she is more than a dead woman to be obsessed over. As Peterson walks free in 2017, Kathleen is a ghost story that he will never be able to walk away from during his lifetime.

True crime is a genre that appeals to a largely female demographic despite most crimes being against women. The Staircase does not defy the expectations that there will not be violence against women—Kathleen’s death is the spark that creates this story. Shows like Inventing Anna or Under the Banner of Heaven also follow this formulaic method. It does not matter if the protagonist is a woman, such as in the case of Inventing Anna , a lot of the consequences of her actions impact women as well. The Staircase is not an exception to this rule of thumb.

This show’s cast is full of veteran actors, which comes as no surprise once pressing play. Michael Stuhlbarg, Dane DeHaan, Sophie Turner, and Patrick Schwarzenegger star. As the family begins to internally implode, the actors elevate the tension as more secrets rise to the surface. This is a story that does not affect just the suspect, Peterson when it comes to the media and increasing attention. His children and family members have to deal with the consequences of what occurred even during the grieving process.

Related: Shining Girls Review: A Time-Travelling Serial Killer is on the Loose

Finding Justice in Tragedy

For fans of the original documentary series, The Staircase fails to offer any new insights or tidbits of information about the case. It merely is a dramatization, something to bring the case to life almost eleven years after it originally happened. Its strengths lie in how it tells a story that viewers may already know from similar shows or by following the case. The Staircase does not feel like something that has been approached many times story-wise, and that is made clear when it shows the graphic crime scene and implications that the viewer may never seem to know what happened.

Related: Under the Banner of Heaven Review: A Violent Interpretation of Faith

And perhaps that is the point of The Staircase : there is something to learn about true crime outside of figuring out the truth. Often, in movies like In Cold Blood or even Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile , the camera gazes on humanizing killers and exposing lessons on humanity. But in a case like Michael Peterson’s, a distinct brand of uncertainty ramps up the interest behind the potential crime’s consequences.

Outside of the graphic moments where the camera may linger a little too long on Collette’s body lying on the staircase, there are little nuggets for fans of the documentary . The inspiration becomes clearer at certain parts, whether replicating the phone calls, tape recorders, or specific moments. As viewers begin to ascend the metaphorical staircase to a moment of revelation, all of these components combined with the efforts that can only be done through television. While a documentary would be unable to make Kathleen come back to life as a character, a television show allows seeing her as a person that lives and breathes.

Other true crime movies use the victims’ families as a symbol, a crux of the act of crime itself. The weeping mother, the grieving siblings, and a father wondering what went wrong. This is not what is seen in The Staircase at all—in real life, things are much messier than a single sweep over a devastated family. Regardless of whether Michael Peterson is guilty or innocent, this story ends in tragedy. A family lost their mother, sister, and cousin.

The Staircase is available to stream on HBO Max. The first three episodes released on May 6, 2022 and the following episodes will be released weekly.

International edition
Australia edition
Europe edition

Colin Firth and Toni Collette in The Staircase.

‘I was literally shocked’: the true story behind new TV drama The Staircase

The confounding, and unsolved, case of a man accused of killing his wife that inspired a landmark docuseries has led to a star-studded new crime drama

A woman lies dying in a pool of blood at the bottom of a staircase. Her husband, a novelist, calls 911. It is 2.40am.

“My wife had an accident,” says a frantic Michael Peterson. “She’s still breathing!”

The operator asks: “What kind of accident?”

Peterson replies: “She fell down the stairs. She’s still breathing! Please come!”

This the transcript of a 911 call on 9 December 2001. It was too late to save Kathleen Peterson. She died at the couple’s mansion in Durham, North Carolina. But Michael Peterson was given little time to mourn.

Investigators found walls heavily spattered with blood and believed that Kathleen’s severe injuries were difficult to reconcile with a fall. Days later Peterson, then 58, was charged with first-degree murder of his 48-year-old wife.

He was convicted and spent nearly eight years in prison, only for his life sentence to be overturned amid questions about the reliability of a key witness. Now the couple’s shocking and elusive story is told in The Staircase , a new drama series starring Colin Firth and Toni Collette.

Perhaps the most eager viewer will be Larry Pollard, who was the Petersons’ nextdoor neighbour and used to play in the house as a child. He never believed that Michael Peterson was guilty of killing his wife, a telecoms company executive.

“I never saw one bit of trouble,” says Pollard, 74, from his neighbouring home on Cedar Street. “In fact, I thought they were a very colourful couple. She was a very sociable lady and very well-liked in the neighbourhood.

“Michael was a bon vivant. People liked him because he’s humorous. He’s not very tall but he’s he’s quick-witted. He was fun to be around.”

Peterson is a Vietnam war veteran whose novels The Immortal Dragon, A Time of War and A Bitter Peace are centred on the conflict. He had also been an unsuccessful candidate for mayor of Durham.

The Petersons visited the Pollards at their home about a month before the tragedy. Pollard recalls: “They walked away from our yard hand in hand. I didn’t see any kind of angst against each other. I hadn’t heard anything about them being that way. They were well-liked. They were entertaining people. They were somewhat the darlings of the social set at that time.”

Pollard, a former lawyer and special prosecutor, finds the timing of the alleged murder implausible because, he says, Peterson’s children were about to visit and his home had just been illuminated with lavish Christmas decorations.

“When all of the authorities got there that night they came in, it was two o’clock in the morning and everybody’s looking down at the body. Everybody is assuming that she has been murdered. There’s blood all over the walls. ‘Oh, gosh, there’s a pool of blood, she had to have been beaten to death.’

“They weren’t taking in any other facts, anything that might have been different. Everyone was just assuming that this was probably a domestic quarrel where he got mad and beat her to death. At that time, domestic violence was a very serious topic. This quickly became a domestic violence case.

“I, on the other hand, was not so sure. It just seemed out of character, but even more than that, why was this house all lit up from one end to the other, top to bottom and floodlights everywhere? If you’re going to beat your wife to death, you would think you don’t want people watching.”

Peterson went on trial in 2003. His defence argued that the couple were drinking by their swimming pool late into the night and an intoxicated Kathleen went inside by herself and fell down the stairs.

Caitlin Atwater, Clayton Peterson, Kathleen Peterson, Michael Peterson, Todd Peterson, Martha Ratliff and Margaret (Ratliff) Blakemore.

The prosecution did not describe a murder weapon or offer a clear motive but grilled Peterson about the death of a family friend whose body was also found at the bottom of a staircase years earlier in Germany. It also targeted his bisexuality, suggesting that Kathleen had discovered he was leading a secret life and cheating on her.

Defence lawyer David Rudolf recalls: “We had heard rumours that the police were looking for some male lover at a gym or something like that so we asked him and he told us that he was bisexual and had instances of sex with various men. Not that it was an every week thing but that had happened.

“For me, it was a non-issue like, OK, so if a husband has an affair with a woman, does that make him a murderer? I didn’t see any distinction to be drawn between having that with a woman or having it with a man.

“On the other hand, particularly for [prosecutor] Freda Black , it was a real moral issue that she took a lot of importance from. A lot of the people on the jury were religious and I think probably for them it was an important factor, not terribly relevant, but necessarily important in the sense that it it cast Michael in a negative light.”

Peterson was found guilty of beating his wife to death and sentenced to life in prison without parole. The verdict hit Rudolf hard. He says: “I’ll never forget it. It was absolutely soul-crushing. It was beyond belief that jury came back guilty.

“As I’ve said many times, it made me question whether I had been part of the same trial that everybody else had been part of. Michael put on a very brave face in public but I am told that, when he got back in in the holding area, he broke down. He just didn’t want to show it in front of his kids.”

But the verdict fell apart after Duane Deaver, a blood spatter analyst of the state bureau of investigation, was fired in 2011 following an independent audit that found problems in 34 of his cases. Rudolf cited statements from jurors that they relied on Deaver’s discredited testimony, and the original trial judge, Orlando Hudson, ordered a new trial.

Peterson was released from prison but Rudolf, who was now working pro bono, could see what a toll it had taken on him. “I was literally shocked. He had aged 20 years or more in those in those eight years. But he always maintained his sarcastic sense of humour.

“I remember the first time I went to visit him. I felt awful and I said something like, ‘Michael, you know, I probably feel as bad about this as you do.’ He said, ‘David, you’re going home in your BMW tonight and I’m going to be here. So you don’t feel as bad as I do.’ That sums up how Michael dealt with it through gallows humour as he did throughout the trial.”

Hudson declined to drop the charges, however, so in 2017 Peterson agreed to a plea deal that enabled him to maintain his innocence even as he acknowledged that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict him of manslaughter in his wife’s death.

The judge sentenced Peterson to 64 to 86 months in prison and gave him credit for the 89 months he had already spent behind bars, allowing him to walk out of court a free man.

Rudolf, who earlier this year published a book, American Injustice , says: “It was as though a huge boulder had been lifted off my shoulders. It was redemption. It was joy. That would have been probably the happiest, most satisfying day in court for me ever. I really experienced both extremes in this particular case.”

Peterson, however, felt “bitterness” over what had been done to him, the lawyer adds, and is now living in an apartment in Durham and spending time with his family.

The Staircase explores the lives of the Petersons’ children: Michael’s two sons, Todd and Clayton, with his first wife, their two adopted daughters, Margaret and Martha, and Kathleen’s daughter, Caitlin.

The extraordinary twists and turns of the trial were filmed for a documentary series, also called The Staircase , that became a big “true crime” hit before a sequel series landed on Netflix. The documentary crew is played by actors in the new drama series, with Vincent Vermignon playing the director, Jean-Xavier de Lestrade.

Despite all the attention, the riddle of Kathleen’s death remains unsolved, inviting new theories. Pollard, the neighbour and former lawyer, believes that her wounds were the result of an owl attack.

The theory holds that Kathleen was putting up Christmas decorations that an owl could have mistaken for prey. It points to hair pulled out by the roots in Kathleen’s hands and bloody twigs and two feather fragments in her hair.

Pollard says: “Owls’ talons are needle sharp. They go straight through the hair until they hit the flesh covering the skull. That is what I determined to be the wounds. If that is the cause of her death, then Michael Peterson is automatically an innocent man. They’ve gone through a trial simply because they didn’t know what it was.

“The grand jury returned a bill of indictment but everybody was chasing rabbits, as far as I’m concerned. They were sitting out there and they’re saying, ‘Oh, he beat her death. Oh, he’s got a gay lover’, all this, that and the other. There was a lot of gossip. This whole episode was a colossal rush to judgment.”

The Staircase is available on HBO Max in the US and Now TV in the UK

US television
Colin Firth
Toni Collette

Most viewed

an image, when javascript is unavailable

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

Colin firth and toni collette in hbo max’s ‘the staircase’: tv review.

The acclaimed documentary 'The Staircase' becomes a star-studded scripted limited series about a North Carolina author accused of murdering his wife in 2001.

By Daniel Fienberg

Daniel Fienberg

Chief Television Critic

Share this article on Facebook
Share this article on Twitter
Share this article on Flipboard
Share this article on Email
Show additional share options
Share this article on Linkedin
Share this article on Pinit
Share this article on Reddit
Share this article on Tumblr
Share this article on Whatsapp
Share this article on Print
Share this article on Comment

If you’ve been feeling like every week this spring has seen the release of at least one limited series that strongly resembles a documentary, news feature or podcast you once enjoyed, you’re not wrong.

And if you’re getting a little fatigued with these shows, in which too frequently nothing is added other than Emmy-hungry actors playing dress-up, you’re not alone.

The Staircase

Airdate: Thursday, May 5 (HBO Max)

Cast: Colin Firth, Toni Collette, Michael Stuhlbarg, Juliette Binoche, Dane DeHaan, Olivia DeJonge, Rosemarie DeWitt, Tim Guinee, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Sophie Turner, Vincent Vermignon, Odessa Young and Parker Posey

Creator: Antonio Campos

However, “telling the same story” and “actually being based on source material” are very different things — and however adored some of those true crime/true fraud docs and podcasts might have been, none of them are The Staircase .

Released in 2005 on Sundance Channel in the U.S., Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s eight-part series was Serial before there was Serial , The Jinx before there was The Jinx . It didn’t really invent a genre, but it codified a structure of shifting sympathies, whiplash twists and wild evidentiary reveals that have been followed countless times subsequently. There was a decade during which The Staircase was difficult to find, and then it reappeared on Netflix along with five additional episodes that lacked the craftsmanship and gravitational pull of the original, but at least made that original widely available.

THR Newsletters

More from The Hollywood Reporter

‘tokyo vice’: fan-favorite star unpacks season 2 finale fate and future, tv ratings: ncaa women’s final sets another record, ‘hacks’ star hannah einbinder sets max stand-up special (exclusive), luke bryan says katy perry’s ‘american idol’ exit wasn’t a “huge shock”, national hispanic media coalition releases its first-ever media guide for storytellers (exclusive), adrian schiller, star of ‘the last kingdom,’ dies at 60.

clock This article was published more than 1 year ago

‘The Staircase’ has more twists than the true-crime doc it’s based on

Colin firth and toni collette star in hbo max’s uneven retelling of the famous case that’s more intimate yet more meta.

Sometimes it feels like the only stories Hollywood is interested in telling anymore are the ones we already know.

Sequels, prequels, remakes and reboots now dominate multiplex cinema, with no end in sight. Podcasts have recently joined novels, plays, magazine articles and theme-park rides as adaptation fodder in the era of endless content. Fifteen years ago, “30 Rock” cracked wise about a hypothetical “movie based on a musical based on a movie.” But in 2020, satire was outmatched by reality once more when that series’ creator, Tina Fey, announced an extremely of-our-time project: a film version of her “Mean Girls” stage show, i.e., a movie based on a musical based on a movie based on a book.

In prestige television today, the go-to source material is true crime, most narrativized already by journalists, podcasters and documentarians. Just since February, we’ve gotten the scammer tales “ Inventing Anna ” and “ The Dropout ,” the murder mysteries “The Thing About Pam” and “ Under the Banner of Heaven ,” and revisits of life-altering legal woes like “ Pam & Tommy ,” “Joe vs. Carole” and “The Girl From Plainville.”

On the whole, these shows are packed with A-listers but middling in quality; save for a few exceptions , they tend to be low on fresh insights and real surprises. Against that lackluster standard, HBO Max’s dramatization of “The Staircase” — based on the French docuseries of the same name, which first debuted stateside in 2005 and added updates in 2013 and 2018 — is at least notable for trying something new. In contrast to most of its peers, the well-acted yet droopily paced eight-part miniseries challenges its audience to think more critically about its nonfiction predecessor, the storytelling choices it made and why.

The original “Staircase” doc chronicled — eventually for 16 years — the travails of Michael Peterson, a novelist and failed mayoral candidate in Durham, N.C., accused of killing his wife, Kathleen Peterson. The case fascinated because neither the prosecution nor the defense could offer a fully convincing account of how Kathleen, a corporate executive, ended up dead at the bottom of the stairs in the couple’s mansion. Michael could ooze sincerity, but he’d already been exposed as a liar. During his thwarted political career, the former Marine had deceived voters about receiving a Purple Heart in Vietnam.

Prosecutors also made much hay out of the gay pornography on his computer, exploiting the biphobia of the mid-2000s that portrayed men attracted to both sexes as shifty and unreliable. In interviews, filmmaker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade has said that, with “The Staircase,” he had intended to make a film about how the justice system worked for someone White and wealthy, like Michael. According to the docuseries that resulted, which ended up sympathizing with Michael while never uncovering the truth behind Kathleen’s final moments, the system was a catastrophe.

The long, sensational murder trial behind Netflix’s ‘The Staircase’

The fictionalized miniseries takes a more intimate, and yet more meta, approach to the case, exploring perspectives, details and at least one outré but compelling theory discarded by de Lestrade, who himself features as a character. (The new drama is probably best experienced as a supplement to the docuseries, rather than a substitute for it.) Colin Firth and Toni Collette star as empty-nesters Michael and Kathleen, whose blended family of seven includes three children in college when the Peterson matriarch is found dead two weeks before Christmas 2001. (None of the five children stem from Michael and Kathleen’s union, but are the result of previous marriages and adoptions — a factor that may play a role in the kids’ eventual splintering.) Frequent jumps in time help humanize Kathleen, who’s embodied with an earthy warmth and reflexive fair-mindedness by Collette. She emerges as fully fleshed, a loving but exhausted woman contending with a restless, demanding husband and a large brood that needs more help than she had hoped they would by this phase of her life.

Glum and plodding — and occasionally grisly — the series gets off to a slow start, even as it posits a primal nightmare scenario: What if you suddenly found your soul mate dead and you were the sole suspect? In Paris, the case catches the attention of two freshly minted Oscar winners on the hunt for their next project, director Jean-Xavier (Vincent Vermignon) and producer Denis (Frank Feys). Upon arriving in Durham, the duo are silently elated that Michael is much more promising as a “character” than they could have hoped. Juliette Binoche also co-stars as a woman whose contributions to the docuseries may be just as crucial as her above-the-line collaborators’.

The dozens of cuts and wounds discovered on Kathleen’s body — but especially the seven deep lacerations on her scalp — persuade her sisters (Rosemarie DeWitt and Maria Dizzia), as well as her sole biological daughter, Caitlin (Olivia DeJonge), that Michael is responsible for her death. For his part, Michael betrays little emotion when he orders his other daughters (Sophie Turner and Odessa Young) to cut Caitlin out of their lives for the sake of his trial — and Firth is fantastic at revealing how quickly his character can flit between pragmatism and casual cruelty. Michael is loath to spend his entire fortune on his legal defense, estimated to cost half a million dollars, lest his children end up with nothing. It’s easy to see how resentful Caitlin would be in response, seeing her inheritance help pay the legal bills of the man she believes killed her mother.

Where Michael is sometimes thoughtlessly callous, his lawyer, David Rudolf (a softly oppressive Michael Stuhlbarg), is oily and calculating, instructing one of the loyal daughters, for instance, to change her hair color for the sake of optics. These details don’t quite cohere into a whole, and the sons (Dane DeHaan and Patrick Schwarzenegger), especially, are thinly drawn. But we do get a sense of how devastating Kathleen’s death and Michael’s subsequent prosecution were for the entire family — and how much more surreal it was to simultaneously become an object of tabloid exploitation and a documentary subject trailed by a camera crew.

It’s unfortunate that the first half of the season is so poorly paced, since some viewers might not stick around until the end of the fourth episode. That’s when “The Staircase” suggests a dramatic gearshift to something else entirely: the rare fictionalization that underscores the many narrative decisions that went into piecing together its ostensibly more straightforward, fly-on-the-wall precursor. It’s impossible to know where this sweeter yet potentially troubling development will go (only five episodes were provided to critics), but creators Antonio Campos and Maggie Cohn seem to indicate that the unknowability of this case extends much further than the matter of Michael Peterson’s guilt. The twists in the making of the docuseries, it turns out, rival the bizarre swerves in the homicide case itself.

“The Staircase” does limit some of its own potential by orbiting the docuseries so closely. Michael is convinced that his anti-police columns in the local newspaper have biased law enforcement against him, and that’s a narrative strand left frustratingly dangling in the previewed chapters. But the series’ greatest letdown is its minimal sense of the setting that so suffused the docuseries. Durham is “a big town that feels small,” says de Lestrade at one point, but, at least in the episodes so far, it fails to locate the precise turn-of-the-millennium homophobia that likely prejudiced the jury against the real-life Peterson. In the end, its pleasures are rather cerebral, less a whodunit than a story about telling stories — and the omissions in hopeful service of a greater truth.

The Staircase premieres Thursday on HBO Max with Episodes 1-3; new episodes will stream weekly.

30 years later, ‘Lois and Clark’ is still the hottest thing DC ever did September 12, 2023 30 years later, ‘Lois and Clark’ is still the hottest thing DC ever did September 12, 2023
Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner’s divorce sparks outrage about mom-shaming September 7, 2023 Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner’s divorce sparks outrage about mom-shaming September 7, 2023
‘Talk to Me’ speaks to everyone August 26, 2023 ‘Talk to Me’ speaks to everyone August 26, 2023

Skip to main content
Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Pop Culture Happy Hour

Performing Arts
Pop Culture

'The Staircase': A drama about a docuseries about a 20-year-old murder case

Linda Holmes

Toni Collette and Colin Firth in The Staircase. HBO Max hide caption

Toni Collette and Colin Firth in The Staircase.

It's always interesting when you find yourself at odds with other critics. I used to observe a strict rule of not reading anybody else's opinions about anything until I was sure I was done writing or saying everything I was going to write or say, just to make sure I wasn't influenced. But more recently, I've learned that expectations and track records and a variety of other factors can make it hard to feel like a blank slate when it comes to a piece of art. And sometimes, seeing what someone else has said clarifies my own thinking — sometimes because I think they're right, and sometimes because I think they're wrong. So while I don't seek out reviews of things I'm not finished talking about yet, I don't avoid them either.

Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on Apple Podcasts and Spotify .

I bring this up because I found myself impatient with the well-reviewed HBO Max series The Staircase , created by Antonio Campos. (See the positive reviews in The Hollywood Reporter and Vanity Fair , for instance.) It stars Colin Firth as Michael Peterson, the Durham, NC writer who was convicted of the murder of his wife, Kathleen, and became the subject of a popular 2004 documentary series also called The Staircase .

Many years after Peterson's conviction, after a judge concluded that some of the expert testimony in his trial was false, Peterson was granted a new trial. Rather than try him again, the state allowed him to make an "Alford plea" — essentially a guilty plea where you maintain your innocence but admit the state has enough evidence to convict you. He was sentenced to the time he had already served and was released. (Alford pleas were also the final resolution of the cases behind the Paradise Lost documentaries .)

For a while after its release, the original series of The Staircase was hard to find for U.S. audiences. But as the case continued to twist, additional episodes were added in 2013 and 2018, and the whole thing wound up on Netflix. Particularly with that added exposure, it's probably one of the most influential true-crime works of the 21st century. It even inspired Trial & Error , an NBC parody series starring John Lithgow.

Colin Firth in The Staircase. HBO Max hide caption

Colin Firth in The Staircase.

Perhaps its ubiquity is why my initial reaction to hearing that there was to be a scripted series, even one with a cast that includes Firth, Toni Collette (as Kathleen in flashbacks), Michael Stuhlbarg (as Michael's lawyer) and Parker Posey (as one of the DAs), was exhaustion. There are an awful lot of stories right now that receive some exhaustive documentary treatment – in this case, more than a decade of it – that seems like it has to have pulled just about every interesting thread, until you wonder what can possibly be left.

This essay first appeared in NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what's making us happy.

Five episodes of The Staircase , out of what will eventually be eight, were given to critics. In those five episodes, the show does two interesting things to try to get around some of the limitations of these shows. The first is the danger of duplicating the documentary, which it escapes in part by incorporating its making. Vincent Vermignon and Frank Feys play the documentary director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade and producer Denis Poncet, who connect with Peterson to begin filming him and his team shortly after his case begins, and whose work ultimately becomes critical to the notoriety and maybe even the resolution of his case.

The other problem is specific to the case at hand here: that there's not an agreed-upon conclusion to this story. Michael ultimately pled guilty without admitting guilt, and despite his conviction, there remains some debate about whether he is actually guilty or not. This is particularly relevant to flashbacks to Michael's marriage to Kathleen, including an examination of what role his bisexuality played in their relationship. The prosecution claimed at trial that Kathleen discovered he was in contact with male sex workers and that this led to an argument during which Michael killed her; he claimed she knew about it and wasn't bothered.

The series (at least through five episodes) is resolute about not taking a position about whether Michael killed Kathleen or not. In fact, it will show you both a speculative scene where it was an accident and a speculative scene where it was murder. This means trying to truthfully tell the story of a marriage without committing to whether it does or does not end in a homicide. Firth and Collette are gifted actors when it comes to emotional nuance, but ambiguity about this fundamental question (and about the claimed motive), justified by the available evidence as it may be, requires them to play scenes so as to make them plausible chapters in two wildly different stories. As good as they are, it's an awful lot to ask of actors, and it makes Kathleen feel half-developed, since you can't know to what degree she is fully informed about her own relationship.

The most successful part of the series is the part that turns the least on whether Michael is in fact guilty, which is the shifting allegiances of his kids (the kids, after all, don't know for sure what happened either). The members of the cast involved in this story — including Sophie Turner and Odessa Young as the young women Michael took in after the death of their mother, a friend, Dane DeHaan and Patrick Schwarzenegger as the sons Michael had before he and Kathleen married, and Olivia deJonge as the daughter Kathleen had — are very good.

But there's an awful lot going on. That story about the documentarians tries to delve into their ethics and their power squabbles over recognition and control and credit. There's a story about how prison affects Michael between his conviction and his release and how he gets by in the meantime. There's a whole story featuring Juliette Binoche that doesn't kick in until the fourth episode. And at the very end of that fifth episode, you learn that yes, they'll be covering the so-called "owl theory," which posits that Kathleen neither fell (as Michael claimed) nor was murdered (as the prosecution claimed) but was attacked by an owl and died from her injuries.

There's too much TV to keep up. Have we hit the limit?

The filmmaking itself is exceptional. The whole show looks great, and the editing (particularly given the complicated structure) is quite brilliant: There is a sequence in which an elevator door closes, and the editing alone tells the story of an entire family in about five seconds. The weaving in of footage that's been altered to look like similar scenes from the documentary is a technical marvel; they've gotten the lighting and the picture to look just like the grainy, cheap-video feel of the real doc. That technique is used sparingly and wisely, as a reminder of how moments that are now famous (among true crime types) are part of a much larger picture.

We unpack the 'Ozark' finale

LISTEN & FOLLOW
Apple Podcasts
Google Podcasts
Amazon Music

Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed.

There's a lot to like about this series. Firth (with his generally British and stoic air) is much more convincing than I expected as the fidgety Peterson. And who doesn't like Juliette Binoche? But there was something about this that held me at a distance, because of the very restlessness — the trial, the marriage, the kids, the investigation, the filmmaking, all swirling faster and faster — that seems to be Campos's intent. It leaves me wondering whether this feeling is fatigue, and thus, whether it is about this series at all. If I hadn't seen so many documentary-to-scripted series, would I be as weary when I see an on-screen indication that we are flashing back to The Happy Times before The Bad Thing happened? I don't know.

Just another entry in the big long list of mysteries without resolutions.

This essay first appeared in NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations on what's making us happy. Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on Apple Podcasts and Spotify .

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

Upcoming Movies and TV shows
Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

What's the Tomatometer®?
Login/signup

Movies in theaters

Opening this week
Top box office
Coming soon to theaters
Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

Netflix streaming
Prime Video
Most popular streaming movies
What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

Monkey Man Link to Monkey Man
The First Omen Link to The First Omen
The Beast Link to The Beast

New TV Tonight

Chucky: Season 3
Mr Bates vs The Post Office: Season 1
Fallout: Season 1
Franklin: Season 1
Dora: Season 1
Good Times: Season 1
Beacon 23: Season 2

The Staircase

Where to watch.

Watch The Staircase with a subscription on Max, or buy it on Vudu, Prime Video, Apple TV.

Cast & Crew

Antonio Campos

Colin Firth

Michael Peterson

Toni Collette

Kathleen Peterson

Michael Stuhlbarg

David Rudolf

Juliette Binoche

Dane DeHaan

Clayton Peterson

Popular TV on Streaming

Tv news & guides, this show is featured in the following articles., series info.

Best Shows on Netflix
Best Movies on Netflix
F1 Live Stream
Stranger Things Season 5
Best New Movies
Most Popular Movies on Netflix
Best Shows on Disney+
UFC Live Stream
Best Movies on Disney+
Entertainment

The Staircase review: A crime drama that loses its footing

The Staircase is a true-crime thriller that does not tell the true story behind the crime at the center of its plot. That’s because the crime in question remains shrouded in mystery. The case’s details continue to plague and nag at the minds of true-crime fanatics everywhere, and forum sites like Reddit are filled with pages dedicated to discussing what might have happened on the fateful 2001 night in which Kathleen Peterson was found dead at the bottom of a staircase in her North Carolina home.

Exploitative at its worst

Addictively entertaining at its best, an imperfect portrait of a 21st-century scandal.

Without an agreed-upon version of what happened on the night Kathleen either tragically died or was brutally killed, The Staircase attempts to tell the twisty true story of the criminal investigation that her death inspired. The show, which is based on Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s 2004 documentary series of the same name, meticulously dramatizes the scandalous trial that played out after Kathleen’s death, as well as the ways in which it fractured the relationships between her loved ones.

At the center of its story is Michael Peterson (Colin Firth), Kathleen’s husband, who became a target of great media scrutiny after he was named the prime suspect in his wife’s possible murder. The Staircase is, much like the documentary series that inspired it and the legions of true-crime fans who are obsessed with the case, primarily interested in getting into the mind of Michael. The pursuit is an admirable one, but The Staircase doesn’t always pull it off with flying colors.

The 10 most popular shows on Max right now
3 great Max crime dramas you should watch in March 2024
3 (HBO) Max crime dramas you should watch in February 2024

Created and written by Antonio Campos and Maggie Cohn, The Staircase keeps its focus on Firth’s Michael as much as possible. That approach allows the series to put him under intense amounts of scrutiny at all times, and there are moments when The Staircase ‘s various parts come together to form a unique portrait of a possible sociopath. However, The Staircase ’s ceaseless interest in Michael also requires that the audience find him as compelling of a figure as its creators. That’s a big assumption to make, considering his oversized ego and ability to be needlessly cruel.

By focusing as intensely as it does on Michael, The Staircase also ends up shortchanging many of its other characters. That’s especially true when it comes to Collette’s Kathleen. While she is given a number of standalone scenes set prior to her death, The Staircase is never as invested in Kathleen as it is in the man who might have murdered her. By prioritizing Michael’s characterization over Kathleen’s, the series shines a bigger spotlight on the suspected perpetrator of a crime than it does its possible victim.

That’s a decision that has marred many past true-crime dramas for similar reasons, but The Staircase takes its uneven treatment of Kathleen one step too far when it literally visualizes two of the ways that she could have died. In the first scene, Kathleen simply trips and falls down her staircase, hitting her head hard enough on the way down that it results in her painfully bleeding out within minutes. In the second scene, Michael pushes Kathleen down the stairs and proceeds to assault her until she’s no longer breathing.

The scenes are intentionally horrifying and feel like they could have been ripped straight out of a prestige horror film, but there is no justifiable reason for them to be included in the show. Kathleen Peterson was a real person, and The Staircase ‘s dramatizations of her death fail to ring with the level of sensitivity that’s necessary for a true-crime adaptation. The two scenes — as well as the intense focus the show’s premiere episode pays to her dead body — rob Kathleen of her humanity, turning her into a prop for The Staircase to use in its mystery.

Fortunately, many of The Staircase ’s biggest shortcomings are made up for by the performances given by its star-studded cast. Colin Firth, to his credit, is exceptional as Michael, playing the character with a straight-faced understated quality that makes him captivating to watch even in the moments when it feels like the show would benefit from shifting its focus away from him. Opposite him, Toni Collette turns in another reliably great performance as Kathleen — even if she is underserved by the show itself.

Juliette Binoche also shines in a role that is, understandably, kept secret throughout much of The Staircase ’s first few episodes. Binoche has one of the most assertive screen presences of any actor in the past 30 years, and she brings depth and dimension to a character that could have very easily come across as one-note in lesser hands. As the director of most of The Staircase ’s episodes, Campos wisely spends several scenes just slowly zooming in on Binoche’s face as she spirals deeper and deeper into her thoughts, and they stand as some of the best moments of the show’s first five installments.

Michael Stuhlbarg similarly impresses as the dry and cutthroat lawyer that Michael hires to represent him during his trial. Meanwhile, Olivia DeJonge and Odessa Young turn in vulnerable, well-calibrated performances as two members of the Peterson clan who begin to question and doubt Michael’s claims about Kathleen’s death. Together, the show’s cast makes watching The Staircase a consistently entertaining and engrossing experience even when it feels the most scattered and unbalanced.

Behind the camera, Campos and Cohn add an interesting layer to The Staircase ’s story that could not be addressed in Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s original documentary series, and that’s the actual making of the production. Played by Vincent Vermignon, Lestrade is a character in the series, as are several of his crew members. Its focus on the creation of the documentary ultimately injects The Staircase with a shot of compelling metacommentary.

Unfortunately, the creation of the documentary ends up being underserved in much the same way many of The Staircase ’s storylines are. The series’ intense focus on diving into the mind of Michael Peterson consumes many of its other narrative detours and subplots — to the point where even the creation of Lestrade’s documentary seems to boil down in the show to whether or not the filmmaker and his crew members believe Michael is innocent.

As a result, The Staircase frequently fails to display the level of empathy for Kathleen Peterson that its story desperately needs, which leaves it feeling lopsided in a way that may not sit well with certain viewers.

The Staircase premieres with its first three episodes on Thursday, May 5 on HBO Max. Digital Trends was provided with access to the series’ first five installments.

Editors' Recommendations

3 great Max crime dramas you should watch in April 2024
Everything coming to Max (formerly HBO Max) in April 2024
3 Peacock crime dramas you should watch in February 2024
Everything coming to Max (formerly HBO Max) in February 2024
5 true crime shows you should watch in October
Streaming Services

America loves true crime. From Ann Rule's bestselling books about famous serial killers in the 1980s and 1990s to the popularity of the Serial podcast in the 2010s, Americans, and most of the world, can't get enough of real-life mayhem and murder.

As a result, there's a bountiful selection of true crime documentaries and TV shows on a wide variety of streamers (Netflix alone is chock-full of intriguing true crime shows). Hulu has upped its true crime game in September, with a number of series devoted to the popular genre. Here are eight shows and movies to watch on Hulu this month.

It’s a universal truth that growing up means, among other things, learning how to say goodbye. All the best children’s stories understand this, and, more often than not, the first major goodbye of a child’s life is the one they say to their favorite toy when they realize they’ve outgrown it. This moment of transition, as well as the collateral damage it leaves in its wake, is at the heart of countless beloved children’s movies, including all four Toy Story films.

It’s at the center of Netflix’s newest miniseries, Lost Ollie, too. The series, which is based on William Joyce’s 2016 children’s book, Ollie’s Odyssey, initially seems to be little more than a playful, straightforward tale of one lost toy’s journey back to its owner. But Lost Ollie ultimately has higher ambitions than its Toy Story-esque premise would suggest.

Apple TV+’s dark comedy thriller Bad Sisters doesn't shy away from showing all the ways that a toxic person can not only ruin other people's lives, but do so without ever even breaking the law. The new series, which comes from co-creators Sharon Horgan, Dave Finkel, and Brett Baer, follows one truly despicable man (played with sneering confidence by Claes Bang) as he continuously poisons the lives of those around him and, in doing so, forces his four sisters-in-law to try to put an end to him.

Unfortunately for the show’s titular sisters, they can only think of one way to get rid of their abusive brother-in-law, and it is decidedly not within the confines of the law. For that reason, Bad Sisters will likely end up receiving comparisons to HBO’s Big Little Lies, which similarly focuses on a group of women who come together to cover up a man’s murder.

Action/Adventure
Children's/Family
Documentary/Reality
Amazon Prime Video

More From Decider

'Captain America: The Winter Soldier' at 10: The Movie That Made (and...

Joy Behar Says She Was "Dragged Into" Controversy Over Beyoncé's 'Jolene'...

Guy Fieri Calls Drew Barrymore "Gangster" For Talking With Her "Mouth Full...

Anna Paquin Shuts Down Hoda Kotb's Questions About Her Health On 'Today'...

'9-1-1' And 'The Bachelor' Crossover: Joey Graziadei And Jesse Palmer Make...

Holly Madison Names “Major Movie Stars” Who Started As Exotic Dancers...

'The View's Whoopi Goldberg Blasts Republicans For "Stupid" Question...

R.I.P. Chance Perdomo: ‘Gen V’ & ‘Chilling Adventures Of...

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Staircase’ On HBO Max, Where Colin Firth Plays Michael Peterson, Who Is Accused Of Murdering His Wife

Where to Stream:

The Staircase (2022)

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Cult Justice’ on Hulu, A True Crime Series Focusing On Cult Leaders, How They Were Caught, And The Voices Of Their Victims

Stream it or skip it: 'crime scene berlin: nightlife killer' on netflix, a docuseries about the hunt for a killer that terrorized berlin's nightclub scene, stream it or skip it: 'files of the unexplained' on netflix, a docuseries about encounters with aliens, ghosts and other unexplained phenomena, holly madison talks about modeling for playboy: “you’re not always going to be surrounded by people who have your best interests”.

The Michael Peterson case has been examined over and over since the death of his wife Kathleen made headlines in 2001. A 2004 docuseries , with a number of follow-up episodes follows the case, moving through his Alford plea in 2017 that essentially freed him from prison for good. Now, the story is getting the scripted treatment, with Colin Firth playing Peterson.

THE STAIRCASE : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We see a closeup of a man’s face. He’s in bed, slow to get up. It’s Feb. 24, 2017, in Durham, NC.

The Gist: We go from that scene, where Michael Peterson (Colin Firth) is struggling with his tie and thinking his kids are in the house, to a frantic 911 call in December of 2001. Peterson, a novelist who is running for mayor of Durham, discovered his wife Kathleen (Toni Collette) at the bottom of the back stairs, barely breathing, at least according to him. Five minutes later, he calls back when she stops breathing. By the time first responders get there, Kathleen is gone.

But as Michael’s younger son Todd (Patrick Schwarzenegger) walks through the house after a night out, the police already investigating, we see that Kathleen’s body and the walls at the bottom of the stairs are covered in blood. Michael is distraught, of course; he claims Kathleen drunkenly tumbled down the stairs while he was in their hot tub. But the police think otherwise.

Flashing back to September, 2001, we see that Kathleen is usually the life of the party, always making plans for her and Michael or one of the members of their blended family — Todd’s older brother Clayton (Dane DeHaan), her daughter Caitlin Atwater (Olivia DeJonge) and Margaret and Martha Ratliff (Sophie Turner, Odessa Young), whom Michael adopted after the death of their mother. She’s also having difficulty at her job at Nortel, where the stock is falling and layoffs are rampant.

In December, all of Peterson’s kids rally by his side, saying that the two of them were a loving couple. His brother Bill (Tim Guinee) gets Michael to talk to a shark of a defense attorney, David Rudolf (Michael Stuhlbarg), who suggests that good people can be caught up in bad situations. Balking at Rudolf’s cost estimate, Michael passes, but when the case goes to the grand jury, he hires Rudolf.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Staircase shares a title with the Netflix docuseries that laid out the Peterson case. The docuseries and its follow-up episodes were directed by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, and the scripted series is based on the docuseries.

Our Take: Antonio Campos and Maggie Cohn created this scripted version of the Michael Peterson case, and in the first episode they take pains to put you on Peterson’s side, while keeping the doubt about his story in the back of your mind. It’s a feat that’s difficult to pull off in series like these, but by shifting the timeline around, they build up the factors that surrounded this confounding case and made it take so many twists and turns.

Firth doesn’t play Peterson as a slimeball. He goes straight to the idea that Peterson is a good guy caught up in a bad circumstance. The first episode proffers theories as to why Peterson would kill Kathleen, including evidence that he was engaged in same-sex affairs. But for the most part, Firth plays Peterson like a man who truly feels he didn’t do it. But some of his overreactions make it seem like that’s not exactly true. The subtleties that the Oscar winner brings to Peterson helps us get over the fact that he’s sporting a non-regional American accent that slips from time to time.

Getting a handle on who’s who in the Peterson family becomes tough if you don’t have foreknowledge of the case. You’re not quite sure which kid is Michael’s and which is Kathleen’s, and the fact that Michael delays telling some of them — as well as how he told her sisters Candace (Rosemarie DeWitt) and Lori (Maria Dizzia) — leave us with enough questions to want to keep watching. At some point, we’ll likely learn that Margaret and Martha’s mom died under similarly suspicious circumstances before Peterson adopted them, and we’re interested in seeing how that plays out.

Sex and Skin: As the extensive autopsy is detailed, we see Kathleen’s naked body on the slab. We’re guessing that’s not actually Collette lying really still, but it’s still a little creepy to see her lifeless body juxtaposed with scenes of Kathleen being very much alive.

Parting Shot: Back in 2017, Peterson gets help with his tie from his current fiancée (who is played by someone we’ve been asked not to reveal). Apparently, it’s a big day for Peterson, who is hoping he’ll be done with court after that day.

Sleeper Star: Parker Posey plays prosecutor Freda Black, the only person in the entire cast who attempts a Southern accent. It’s delightfully over the top in a Designing Women sort of way, but also shows that Freda is going to be one to be reckoned with.

Most Pilot-y Line: When the police return to Peterson’s house for a secondary search, he yells at the officer, “I’m getting dressed to see my dead wife in a coffin!” In lesser hands than Firth’s, that line would have been overwrought. Even in Firth’s hands, it toes that line.

Our Call: STREAM IT. As a whole, The Staircase is a worthwhile watch, mainly for the performances by Firth, Posey and Collette. But you might get more satisfying information about the Peterson case by watching the documentary or docuseries.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream It Or Skip It

Does 'Yellowstone' Return Tonight? Everything To Know About 'Yellowstone's Season 5, Part 2 Premiere Date

Will There Be A 'Resident Alien' Season 4? What We Know

New Shows & Movies To Watch This Weekend: 'Mary & George' on Starz + More

Dwayne Johnson Gets Into Verbal Altercation With WWE Fan: "Watch Your F**king Mouth"

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Tearsmith’ on Netflix, An Italian Teen Romance Based On A Popular Novel

'9-1-1's Harry Grant Returns In Season 7: Why Marcanthonee Reis Was Recast

‘The Staircase’ Review: HBO Max Drama Puts a Narrative Twist on a True-Crime Docuseries

Colin Firth plays Michael Peterson in this limited series that also dramatizes the making of the true crime doc about his case

True crime folds back in on itself with “The Staircase,” perhaps the only recent, high-profile miniseries to feature a scene where documentarians sit outside a recording booth as musicians work on the mournful score for a true-crime miniseries. Yet “The Staircase,” an eight-episode HBO Max miniseries, isn’t exactly a meta exercise, either. It’s full of tricky, complicated ambiguities that are often riveting and sometimes just baffling. (It’s all the more slippery only having seen the first five episodes provided for review.)

The documentarians making sure the background music strikes those familiar notes of gravitas are a pair of French filmmakers who have taken an interest in the real-life crime drama of Michael Peterson (Colin Firth), an American on trial for the 2001 murder of his wife Kathleen (Toni Collette). Michael claims that he came across his wife’s bloodied body at the foot of a staircase, indicating that she must have slipped and fell, out of earshot from him; the prosecution believes that she was beaten to death.

The case quickly fractures a blended, extended, borderline convoluted family, which includes Michael’s biological sons Clayton (Dane DeHaan) and Todd (Patrick Schwarzenegger) from a previous marriage; his adopted daughters Margaret (Sophie Turner) and Martha (Odessa Young), who he and his ex-wife took in after their parents died; and Kathleen’s daughter Caitlin (Olivia DeJonge), from her own previous marriage. To capture all of these tense relationships, the series skips around in time. A chunk of it proceeds forward through Kathleen’s death, the aftermath and run-up to the trial, the trial itself, and beyond; there are also flashbacks that fill in family history in the months leading up to the incident. Considering that there are also a few elusive scenes set in 2017 featuring a character played by Juliette Binoche, the remaining three episodes will need to continue jumping ahead to cover all of its ground.

The plotting of all this is relatively straightforward and easy to follow, even when the show offers two versions of Kathleen’s death, seemingly without endorsing either of them as definitive. The murk (and occasionally confusion) comes from the characters’ various relationships, especially within the family—intentionally so, though not always productively. The show offers vivid details for supporting characters like Michael’s lawyer David (Michael Stuhlbarg) or the prosecutor Freda Black (Parker Posey), who at times seems more disgusted by revelations about Michael’s sex life than the idea that he might have committed murder. But there are a lot of figures flitting in and out of the narrative (in the first five episodes, Rosemarie DeWitt is probably the strongest actor given little to do), a crowd that only increases when the show gives more time to the documentary crew led by director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade (Vincent Vermignon).

This version of “The Staircase” is neither a making-of series about the docu-series that resulted (also called “The Staircase,” with a run spread across its initial eight episodes in 2004, two more in 2013, and a final three for Netflix in 2018) nor a straight recreation of its events in fictionalized form. But it does acknowledge the documentarians and makes them part of the story—moreso after Peterson receives his initial verdict halfway through the series, and the filmmakers continue working on their project as others attempt to adjust to a new status quo. So will the next iteration of this material feature a fictionalized version of the HBO Max series’ director Antonio Campos and his crew sorting through the documentary footage in order to make their series?

Through the fifth episode, the documentary angle isn’t the show’s most interesting. The best moments evoke the queasy fascination of a good (or at least entertaining) true-crime doc, built around a strong performance from Firth, who ably translates his often-uptight Britishness into a rougher-hewn American equivalent. Michael presents himself as kind of a forthright, semi-collegiate man of reason, and Firth captures how opaque that mask of upper-middle-class propriety can be. The fact that the mostly-grown kids’ ages are difficult to discern becomes an advantage, as this neo-Brady Bunch family reverts to kids listening on the stairs because they’re not completely privy to adult conversations.

If the emotional component of all this feels a little light, sometimes even clinical in its quasi-objectivity, it’s still an impressive production. Creator Antonio Campos, who also directs six of the eight episodes (“Fear Street” director Leigh Janiak handles the other two), brings in some ambitious filmmaking flourishes, like depicting Todd’s arrival at the scene of his stepmother’s death with an extended, unbroken taken, capturing the emotional chaos and uncertainties of such a horrific shift, or the second-episode sequence where a fundraiser at the Peterson home is intercut—blended, really, courtesy of some clever trick shots—with a forensic walkthrough for the trial.

It’s hard to tell how rewarding the newer “Staircase” will prove over its full run; while of course it’s possible to see where the story is heading by looking up the actual facts of the case, the tension still slackens somewhat after the big trial ends. (Again, without the final three episodes, it’s hard to say whether it tightens back up again.) Then again, bringing this case to a satisfyingly tense climactic confrontation wouldn’t fit the material. This is a series that seems to admit that a lot of true crime, or at least this one, is really a no-win slow descent into a tragic morass.

“The Staircase” premieres on HBO Max on May 5 with three episodes, followed by one new episode each week through June 9.

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy . We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

‘The Staircase’ Review: Colin Firth Slays in HBO Max’s Sly Study of Why We Assign Guilt and Innocence

Ben travers.

Share on Facebook
Share to Flipboard
Share on LinkedIn
Show more sharing options
Submit to Reddit
Post to Tumblr
Print This Page
Share on WhatsApp

In the scripted version of “ The Staircase ,” Kathleen Peterson (Toni Collette) slips on a step, falls down, and dies. The blood pouring from the top of her head is soon spread over the walls as she struggles to sit up, creating a convincing scene to the one soon discovered, photographed, and endlessly analyzed by the police. Like her distraught husband Michael ( Colin Firth ) claims from the start, Kathleen’s death was an accident.

And yet, Kathleen Peterson is murdered. A heated argument turns physical. The hallway again transforms into its inevitable, nightmarish state. Michael is both angry and apologetic, but he’s unquestionably at fault. Like the district attorney and his team claim from the start, Kathleen’s death was a homicide.

With only five of the limited series’ eight episodes screened for critics, there very well may be a third or fourth reenactment of a murder that’s been debated for nearly two decades. And that’s just fine. Much like the docuseries that inspired Campos — who’s been so obsessed with Michael Peterson’s case that he attended certain court proceedings — 2022’s “The Staircase” is built as a disruptor. Where Jean-Xavier de Lastrade’s intimate unscripted series provided incredible access to a long, troubled legal process — and encouraged reconsideration of Michael’s guilt — the scripted edition creates scenes, conversations, and perspectives to portray an even more personal vision of the entire Peterson family. Authenticity takes precedent over fact-finding, which fits not only this fictionalized production but the series’ central argument, as well: Some truths are inextricably tied to who tells the better story.

While still rooted in research (certain lines and plenty of moments from the documentary are repeated), Campos and co-showrunner Maggie Cohn introduce Lastrade (played by Vincent Vermignon) and his producer Denis Poncet (Frank Feys) as characters, using their work to confront the subjectivity of art and how it compares to the alleged objectivity in a court of law. “The Staircase” indulges the now-standard question driving most true-crime stories — guilty or not guilty — and but also asks if, some of the time, we can know either conclusion with enough certainty. As is inevitable with two shows covering much of the same ground, many of the points overlap, and those who’ve seen the docuseries may not need to watch the HBO Max adaptation (or may grow frustrated with another iteration of the Peterson saga lacking definitive proof). But the slick structure, winking commentary on true-crime culture, and a killer performance from Colin Firth, among others, make “The Staircase” a gripping and nimble successor.

The Staircase HBO Max Colin Firth Toni Collette

It’s also a broader examination told through three distinct timelines. One follows an older, skittish Michael in 2017, as he prepares for a fateful day in court. The main arc starts on December 9, 2001, when Todd Peterson (Patrick Schwarzenegger) returns from a party to find cop cars surrounding his father’s house, Michael sobbing inside, and his step-mom dead at the base of the stairs. Finally, the last timeline tracks Kathleen in the months leading up to her final night alive.

The chronological examination of the case, as it unfolds, sucks viewers into the mystery all over again. First, Michael and his family have to come to terms with a murder charge few of them expected. Then, as the investigation gets under way, secrets about dear old dad start to spill out. The tight-knit Peterson clan — made up of two adopted children, two from Michael’s first marriage, and one from Kathleen’s first marriage — slowly erode, as conflicting accounts and inconclusive evidence split the kids into believers and non-believers. But Campos, who directs six episodes and writes or co-writes five, is clever about using the separate timelines to better inform why some aspects of the case stick with select family members more than others, resulting in nuanced depictions of Margaret (Sophie Turner) and Martha (Odessa Young), especially.

Kathleen’s pre-death timeline works to do the same, fleshing out a woman who’s predominantly known for what happens to her husband after she’s gone. Collette, as usual, is dialed in; she instills Kathleen with a generous spirit, both in her amiable demeanor and constant support of her family. She’s the breadwinner and the caretaker, the good cop and the bad cop — she does it all. But so far, she still lacks distinction. This Kathleen is more of an everywoman than a partner explored as equally as her complicated husband. More could be coming in the final three hours, but her distressing death scenes again prove more memorable than her light character development.

Firth is given far more to chew on — which makes sense, given he’s alive in all three timelines, rather than only one — and he tears through the role with a magnetic mix of tenderness, arrogance, and constraint. Given everything heaped on the character, it’s remarkable how grounded Firth keeps Michael. This is a guy who mutters to himself when he’s stressed, writes novels, runs for public office (twice), and has to explain lies he’s been caught in while remaining convincingly honest. Multiple people use his name as a verb when he tries to talk his way out of a problem (“Don’t you Michael Peterson me!”), but some of those same skeptics remain loyal to him.

Other actors may be tempted to play up the extremes, creating different Michaels for different people, situations, and phases of his life. One Michael is the guilty Michael, and the other is not guilty. But Firth is consistent on every beat, whether it’s a fleeting look in a key moment or a massive scene, like the four-and-a-half-minute oner that tracks a stammering, shaking Michael in the immediate aftermath of his wife’s death. Every Michael is the same Michael, which helps make either version of Kathleen’s death a believable outcome. Firth also isn’t doing an impression of the man seen in Lastrade’s doc; it’s an embodiment of the history that shaped him combined with the circumstances depicted in the series. Firth finds an American accent that works for him and builds Michael from the script, not the news cycle. He’s not trying to remind you of what you’ve already seen, but hold focus on the person in front of you now.

Pairing nicely with his powerful central performance is a sly sense of humor. Parker Posey, as is her right in every project, elevates off-hand jokes to scene-stealing extremes and sports enough makeup to make Tammy Faye jealous. Rosemarie DeWitt plays Kathleen’s sister with maniacal vigor, attacking Michael at surprising times that always pay off. Dane DeHaan, as the black sheep son Clayton, sparks to life in a later episode by bombing trial prep so hard a fight breaks out. In a true story with this many twists and turns, there has to be room to acknowledge how weird things get, even if leaning too far into the insanity could upset the established tone’s naturalism. Campos trusts his cast to find the right notes, while coordinating the timelines so the black comic bits never overwhelm the story’s urgent drama.

Together, these human elements work to reinforce the series’ examination of subjectivity. Courts are built to find objective truths, but courts are also built by humans, who are subjective, and rely on human subjectivity to function. As one character argues, “A trial is simply two sides competing to tell a better story.” The jurors pick their favorite, and their verdict “becomes justice.” Lastrade’s documentary tackled similar ideas, but the HBO Max series takes them further, pushes back on modern genre conventions, and incorporates the impact the original doc had on “justice” for Michael. The defense tells a story, the prosecution tells a story, and the audience — this time, a director wielding a camera — tells their story, too. In matters as grave as this, where the magnitude is emphasized by seeing both tragic versions of Kathleen’s death, no one wants to be wrong. They need to believe in a single truth, whether it’s because their job demands it or because believing in justice serves as a societal comfort blanket. Rather than warm us with answers, as so many modern true-crime stories are happy to do, “The Staircase” asks another question, right in its opening epigraph: “Truth?” said Pontius Pilate, “What is that?”

“The Staircase” premieres three episodes Thursday, May 5 on HBO Max. New episodes will be released weekly.

Most Popular

'The Staircase' Review: Netflix Makes An Old True Crime Doc New Again

What Happened to Kathleen Peterson?

The Original Staircase

The Netflix Staircase

I was expecting the Netflix update on The Staircase to be different than the original. I thought that perhaps Netflix would require Lestrade and company to update the style of the show to better fit in with the other Netflix true crime docs. But aside from improved video quality, the three new Netflix Staircase episodes look and feel almost identical to the original series.

The Netflix episodes pick up in 2014. Peterson is now 71 years old, and wary over the prospect of the new trial. He's also an old man now, and it's clear a weariness has set in. All he wants is for this to be over. So he can take a chance – he can accept an Alford Plea, which more or less means he's admitting his guilt without saying he's guilty, and go free; or he can go to trial again, and risk losing.

These three episodes are devoted to Peterson and his lawyers trying to decide the best course of action. But they also offer new insight into Peterson as a person. While Peterson's bisexuality was a topic mentioned in the original Staircase , Peterson himself never addressed it directly. Here, in this new footage, Peterson sits down for a one-on-one interview with the filmmakers, and speaks about his sexuality. It's a revealing segment, and makes Peterson seem even more sympathetic in the process. It's a moment of clarity that stands out above nearly every other moment of this lengthy docu-series.

If there's a theme to these three new episodes, it's that time marches on, no matter what. So much has changed from the original Staircase . new bits of information have come to light, and it's become even more apparent that Peterson likely didn't receive a fair trial. And yet despite all this, his options are limited, and his age is showing. He looks more worn-down in these episodes; more defeated.

The Netflix episodes also directly address the one-sided nature of the storytelling here, via an unexpected source. Candace Zamperini, one of Kathleen Peterson's sisters who is 100% convinced of Michael Peterson's guilt, stands up in a court scene and delivers a scathing rebuke of Peterson. In the process, she also calls out the documentary crew, underlining the fact that she didn't agree to the making of the film, and that by being so close to Michael Peterson, the doc tells only his side of the story. It's an uncomfortable scene, but Lestrade, to his credit, leaves it intact.

Through it all, the mystery remains. Did Michael Peterson kill Kathleen Peterson, or was it a tragic accident? "We all want to know how the mystery ends," lawyer David Rudolf says to the camera. But even as The Staircase draws to a close, and we're left with a semblance of closure, the mystery remains. It lingers, like the smell of sulfur in the air after you strike a match. Peterson himself sums it all up succinctly. "There is no closure," says the man once convicted of murdering his wife. "This is not an end."

The Staircase arrives on Netflix on June 8, 2018.

How Does '3 Body Problem' Set Up a Season 2?

Fingers crossed for another season!

Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for the Remembrance of Earth's Past books.

The Big Picture

Season 2 of 3 Body Problem is still not confirmed by Netflix, but there is a lot of story for the show to tell still.
Saul Durand struggles to understand his role as a Wallfacer amid threats.
Characters like Jin Cheng and Auggie face unique challenges in the fight against the San-Ti.

The first season of 3 Body Problem was a breath of fresh air for sci-fi fans. It was very different from what fans expected, choosing to incorporate elements of all three books in Liu Cixin 's Remembrance of Earth's Past series and doing it competently enough to leave us wanting more. Unfortunately, a second season still hasn't been confirmed by Netflix , though showrunners David Benioff , D.B. Weiss , and Alexander Woo have already been working on a new season and planning. Until we learn what Netflix's decision is with more seasons, there's a lot to speculate about when it comes to how this version of 3 Body Problem will play out. There's still a lot to see in the world of 3 Body Problem , though, as the eight episodes we've got so far tease the future of the series in major ways .

3 Body Problem

A fateful decision made in 1960s China reverberates in the present, where a group of scientists partner with a detective to confront an existential planetary threat.

Saul Must Figure Out Ye Wenjie's Riddle in '3 Body Problem'

In 3 Body Problem 's season finale, "Wallfacer," Saul Durand ( Jovan Adepo ) has his life turned upside down as he's suddenly taken from London to New York and is invested as a Wallfacer in a special ceremony at the United Nations General Assembly Hall. That's a lot for anyone to process so suddenly, and Saul is no different. A Wallfacer's job is to conceive a plan to deal with the San-Ti threat and keep it inside their heads until the time comes to put it in motion . A noble task, but Saul just lost his job as a scientist thanks to the sophon's block on scientific research. Why him, then?

The answer that UN Secretary General Lilian Joseph ( CCH Pounder ) can offer Saul doesn't help, as she is not sure, either. The fact is that the San-Ti see Saul as a threat and have made him the only human they are actively trying to kill. Saul still hasn't realized it , but this is because of his encounter with Ye Wenjie ( Rosalind Chao ) at Vera Ye's ( Vedette Lim ) grave in Episode 7, "Only Advance." Back then, Wenjie tells him a joke about Einstein trying to play music with God and is severely punished, a disguise for her "cosmic sociology" thesis: don't try to contact advanced alien civilizations, because they don't want to coexist . By the time Season 1 ends, Saul has experienced two attempts against his life but hasn't connected the dots about Ye Wenjie's joke.

In the novels, Saul's counterpart is the Wallfacer Luo Ji, who has a similar meeting with Ye Wenjie and suffers similar consequences. His journey is a rollercoaster, and he watches as the other Wallfacers — who he thinks are actually qualified for the job, not him — plan, but it takes a long time for him to understand his role. He even goes into hibernation before he can figure it out, but the whole journey is the kind of thriller the 3 Body Problem creators know how to build, considering Benioff and Weiss' experience with Game of Thrones , and Woo's experience writing on True Blood . In Season 2, Saul will surely find himself way out of his element, despite being the only person who has all the tools to solve the San-Ti crisis.

Jin Chen and Thomas Wade Have To Fix the Staircase Project

Inserting elements from all three novels of Remembrance of Earth's Past right in the first season of 3 Body Problem may seem hasty, but it was actually what made the Netflix adaptation unique . The group of main characters, for example, each embodies aspects of characters from different novels, like Jin Cheng ( Jess Hong ), Will Downing ( Alex Sharp ), and Thomas Wade ( Liam Cunningham ), who are characters from the third book, Death's End . Together, those three lead another important project in the fight against the San-ti: The Staircase Project.

Proposed by Jin Cheng after the San-Ti revealed themselves and their sophons to the world, the Staircase Project consists of sending a frozen human brain to the San-Ti invasion fleet to act as a probe. It counts on the aliens being unable to understand how humans think and wanting to learn more about how we work. Thus, Will could act as a probe and even an agent for humankind against the enemy. However, the solar sail that was supposed to take Will's brain to the San-Ti is destroyed after one of its cables detaches after launch, meaning Will will wander in space forever... Unless someone finds him. That can't happen unless there is someone to continue the project in the future, despite its failure.

The novels have an answer to what will happen to Will, but, in the meantime, Jin's arc has to develop on Earth, too. With hibernation technology ready by the end of Season 1, Thomas Wade mentions to Jin that he will hibernate and keep waking up until the final battle against the San-Ti to make sure humanity's preparations are going according to plan. The two of them have an interesting dynamic, with Jin and Clarence "Da" Shi ( Benedict Wong ) often being the weight that prevents Wade from drifting into megalomaniacal plans. Da Shi is now the head of security for Saul as a Wallfacer, so Jin will have to keep Wade grounded by herself . With her best friend and romantic interest adrift in space plus the destiny of humankind, she will have to balance all that as the plot progresses into the future. Finding a solution to fix the Staircase Project could save Will from an eternity of floating around in space.

The 10 Best Sci-Fi Mystery Movies, Ranked

Auggie is the last piece in the oxford five puzzle, but she doesn’t fit anywhere.

Among the many changes in the lore of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, the biggest is the Oxford Five, the group of five friends who eventually become instrumental in the fight against the San-Ti . Jack Rooney ( John Bradley ) and Will Downing may be out of the picture, and Saul Durand and Jin Cheng are both engaged in crucial projects with the Planetary Defence Council (PDC), but the last of the Five is off doing her own thing: Augustina "Auggie" Salazar ( Eiza González ). At the end of Season 1 of 3 Body Problem , Auggie is back in Mexico helping small communities with her nanofiber technology.

During Season 1, Auggie also worked with Thomas Wade on the operation at the Panama Canal in Episode 5, " Judgment Day ," but grew frustrated and traumatized by the way things were carried out. The loss of life affected her the most, since she developed her research in nanotechnology to help people, not kill them. Her counterpart in the novels, Wang Miao, has similar internal conflicts, but has his part finished in the first novel, The Three-Body Problem , and is only briefly mentioned in the following two installments. So Auggie is her own character from now on, walking a completely original path . While Wang Miao's work is still part of humanity's efforts in the struggle against the San-Ti, Auggie planned everything to use her research for her benefit.

While Auggie's story in further seasons of 3 Body Problem is not the only one that's completely original, Tatiana Haas ( Marlo Kelly ) is also a great addition to the lore. However, Auggie is still bound by her friendship with Jin Cheng and her complicated on-and-off romantic relationship with Saul Durand. Her going to Mexico is a nice turn for the character, but it's certainly not the end of her journey, as she is part of the Oxford Five, and they are the focal point of 3 Body Problem , the lens through which the story is told. Her opposition to Wade is bound to shake her relationship with Jin and Saul. At the same time, her nanofiber technology can still be a game changer for humanity. We just need to actually get a Season 2 for all that to come to fruition, so fingers crossed.

3 Body Problem is available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.

WATCH ON NETFLIX

Meta and Eli Roth’s VR Series ‘The Faceless Lady’ Is a Fascinating, Flesh-Ripping Trip Into Fully Immersive Horror Storytelling

By William Earl

William Earl

administrator

‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Series Finale: How Larry David Wrapped Up the Show by Rewriting the Ending of ‘Seinfeld’ 1 day ago
How ‘The First Omen’ Channels ’70s Horror Imagery and Remixes the Most Terrifying Scares From the 1976 Original, and What a Sequel Might Look Like 4 days ago
Vera Drew Was So Inspired by Todd Phillips’ ‘Joker’ That She Made an Unauthorized Parody Film About Her Trans Journey: ‘My Community Is Completely Villainized’ 5 days ago

Minutes into the medieval intro of “ The Faceless Lady ,” a fair maiden rips off her face. You immediately feel a bit nauseated. But did the violence trigger that reaction — or is it the fact that the action seems to be happening somewhere deep in your visual cortex?

“The Faceless Lady,” a collaboration between Meta and producer Eli Roth , is billed as “the first known scripted original VR live action, stereoscopic (3D) series ever produced of its size.” Although it’s designed for the Meta’s Quest headset, the story and scope seem wide enough to exist out of the headset. It’s a complete package that could bring fresh eyes to next-gen storytelling.

Unlike schlocky horror films embracing gimmicky technology — such as the notoriously low-rent 3D of “Friday the 13th Part III” — “The Faceless Lady” doesn’t throw things at the screen to titillate. In fact, the series takes its time to gradually acclimates audiences to the texture of the show.

The transition can be a shock. The pilot opens with a knight-filled prequel teasing the genesis of the castle’s dark lore, and it evokes an up-close version of high frame rate films. Used by directors like Peter Jackson in his “Hobbit” films and Ang Lee in “Gemini Man” and “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” these big screen experiments gave the work a “realer than real” quality, which is replicated here.

While easier to get used to than the soap-opera-esque visuals of its feature film counterparts, “The Faceless Lady” takes several scenes to adjust to watching in VR. Missing the dreaminess that comes with traditionally lower frame rate movies, costumes and sets look so real that it hits an uncanny valley. The brain is flooded with information as the VR aims to mimic how people see their entertainment, making the user feel they’re living in the world.

Yet “The Faceless Lady” is so thoughtfully shot that it demands immersion. The details matter: During one lush outdoor scene, rain, birds and insects add some nice texture to the screen. A quick-moving ghost in the background of one shot begs for a rewind. The texture on a blanket during one scene, while it would be invisible in a 2D narrative, stays seared to the mind throughout.

From there, the leads are introduced as a mostly interchangeable group of bickering couples who don’t trust each other as they jockey to win the games and ultimately, the castle. Irish actor Tara Lee leads the group with a naturalistic performance able to cut through the artifice, vulnerable and curious in equal measures.

With the conventional plot unraveling at the beginning of the story — the couples arrive and meet each other, the game is explained, and folks poke around the spooky estate — it acts as an opportunity for the audience to get adjusted to the large field of vision. Billed as a 180° project, there is something to look at in every direction a neck could be comfortably craned (although the lion’s share of the action takes place dead center, head straight on). It’s an impressive feat to examine the sharp production design during downbeat moments, listening to the dialogue while craning upwards to check out a dusty staircase, and side-to-side searching for clues.

The only downside to the expanded canvas is that it allows for attention to wander to the point where several scenes merit rewinding, as musical stings signal important moments in case attention is diverted. Additionally, the combination of the high frame rate feel coupled with this sweeping field of vision accounts for some strange moments of subconsciousness, where an oddly-shaped book in the background or a unique manicure could divert attention for minutes. Since the audience is effectively participating in this story, small disruptions in reality can be as disarming as the scariest ghosts.

Perhaps it’s this outer-worldly reality, but beyond the conventional frights, new terrors are unlocked via the medium. The biggest jump scare of Episode 2 shouldn’t be shocking: The camera is focused on a computer playing a video, and someone passes in front of the monitor suddenly while crossing the room. Without musical accompaniment or fanfare, this moment is so jarring that it leaves traditional jolts in the dust. Later on, the sinister vibe is ramped up when a frightened character looks dead into the headset at something behind the viewer, which is not visible. The feeling of being prone, standing in front of something scary, is a jarring use of a fourth wall break that would only be possible to get goosebumps in VR.

Yet this work succeeds as a thrilling and ambitious blueprint for what might be an essential way to experience horror storytelling. With the right blend of story, scares and impressive camerawork, “The Faceless Lady” is the perfect gateway for entertainment fans who want a taste of the future.

“The Faceless Lady” is set to debut its first two episodes today at 5 p.m. PT, with the remaining chapters debuting every Thursday, at Meta Horizon World . Fans can also RSVP for the launch here . Watch the trailer below.

More From Our Brands

Jon stewart calls out u.s. support of israel amid solar eclipse frenzy, two restored barns add to the bucolic charm of this $12.5 million hamptons farmhouse, uconn hoops spending pays off with second straight ncaa title, the best loofahs and body scrubbers, according to dermatologists, fallout to get early full-season drop on amazon — find out when, verify it's you, please log in.

The Girl Who Staged a Home Invasion to Kill Her Parents

Netflix’s latest true-crime doc, “What Jennifer Did,” chronicles the chilling case of Jennifer Pan, who orchestrated a heinous crime—and almost got away with it.

Nick Schager

Entertainment Critic

What Jennifer Did revisits the horrifying tale of Jennifer Pan, who became the subject of Canadian headlines when she survived a home invasion that took the life of her mother Bich and left her father Hann in critical condition. Nonetheless, American Murder: The Family Next Door writer/director Jenny Popplewell’s Netflix documentary (April 10) is a clumsy addition to the ever-expanding true-crime canon, tipping off its central twist with its title, leaving out key details that might have enriched its drama, and sidestepping a discussion of the larger socio-economic forces underscoring its tragedy. It’s consistently engaging, but also not much more revealing than a quick perusal of Jennifer’s Wikipedia page, and the fact that its real-life saga may not be over only amplifies the impression that it’s less than the full story.

On Nov. 8, 2010 (a date that isn’t provided by these proceedings), 24-year-old Jennifer (whose age isn’t relayed) called 911, frantically reporting that a trio of gunmen (all Black, one with a Jamaican accent, and another with dreadlocks) had broken into her Markham, Ontario, home looking for money. In this recording, Jennifer—who claims that the intruders have tied her to an upstairs banister as they assault her parents—is heard yelling to her father, who audibly moans in the background. When police arrived, they discovered a grisly scene: the house was ransacked, Bich was dead, and Hann had suffered a grave gunshot wound to the eye that compelled doctors to place him in a medically induced coma.

Much of this is recounted by homicide detectives Bill Courtice and Alan Cooke, who were initially baffled by the crime. The Pans were one of many immigrant families in the neighborhood, and known to be hard-working and unremarkable. Originally from Vietnam, Bich was a car parts supervisor and Hann was a machinist at the same auto parts manufacturer, and though they owned nice sedans (a Mercedes and a Lexus), they lived a modest middle-class life. The idea that intruders had targeted them for their wealth thus seemed off from the outset. More puzzling still, valuables remained in the house, including a wallet filled with $20 bills, a nice watch, and a pricey camera kept in a closet safe, suggesting that if these men had intended to make off with a bounty, they’d failed miserably—and resorted to unnecessary murder.

What Jennifer Did features the usual array of ho-hum dramatic recreations, but its central material is footage from the York Regional Police Department’s interrogation room, where Jennifer sat for three separate interviews. In extended clips from those talks, Jennifer expands upon her 911 account, avowing that on the night in question, she was at home when her mother returned from line-dancing and sat down in the living room to soak her feet. After saying goodnight to her mom, Jennifer retreated to her room, where she was ultimately accosted by one of the intruders, who bound her hands to the staircase railing. Despite this physical situation, she managed to phone authorities, which struck investigators as odd—and inspired her interrogator to ask her to demonstrate how she pulled off that feat. Through tears, she asserts that she doesn’t know the identity of these men. Nonetheless, police swiftly learned about her boyfriend Danny Wong, a known drug dealer, and that proved to be the key to unraveling this mystery.

In his own interview, Danny acts puzzled about why the Pan clan was singled out by thieves, yet he offers up crucial background on the troubled household. He and Jennifer dated for six years, largely behind the backs of Bich and Hann, who forbid the romance—no surprise, given that he was a going-nowhere drug dealer who worked at a pizza parlor—and more or less kept Jennifer under lock and key, confiscating her cell phone and driving her to and from school. This was an extension of their demanding tiger parenting, and as Jennifer soon admitted, she’d buckled under the weight of their expectations. A successful and award-winning pianist who had started playing at the age of 4, Jennifer was not an academic superstar, and she responded by lying to her parents (for four years!) about attending university to become a pharmacist. She additionally said that she had been receiving the same sorts of mysterious, threatening texts and phone calls that had plagued Danny, who had remained her friend even after moving on to a new relationship.

This was all suspicious, and it pointed in one direction. With no forced entry and the robbery motive appearing to be suspect, cops began assuming that Jennifer wasn’t being completely forthright, and What Jennifer Did ’s interrogation videos depict her as an increasingly agitated individual, compulsively wringing her hands and stroking her hair. When her dad emerged from his coma and told investigators that he remembered seeing his daughter speaking casually with the criminals during the home invasion, her involvement was irrefutably established. In her third sit-down with law enforcement (this time with Bill Goetz, who legally used deception to extract a confession), she once again changed her tune, stating that, because of her unhappiness, she’d hired three men to kill her. This too made no sense, and phone records eventually proved that she and Danny had conspired to employ acquaintances to murder Bich and Hann—all, ostensibly, because Jennifer couldn’t stand to be apart from Danny.

What Jennifer Did conveys this lucidly, if shallowly. It dawdles excessively on certain points, while more or less ignoring Jennifer, Danny, and their accomplices’s ensuing trial; that they earned life sentences for Bich’s murder and Hann’s attempted murder, and are now awaiting a new trial thanks to a successful appeal, are merely noted in closing text cards. Moreover, Popplewell’s film exhibits minimal interest in the cultural and familial dynamics that created this nightmare in the first place, giving passing lip service to the idea that immigrant moms and dads can be tough on kids. Even the question of what Jennifer was really up to during the four years she pretended to attend school is left unanswered, as are specifics about the crime itself. As such, it’s an initially intriguing whodunit that comes across as a sketch rather than a full-bodied portrait.

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here .

READ THIS LIST

IMAGES

The Staircase Review: Netflix Makes An Old True Crime Doc New Again
‎The Staircase (2004) directed by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade • Reviews
The Staircase (1998)
The Staircase Review: Netflix Makes An Old True Crime Doc New Again
The Staircase Review
The Staircase

VIDEO

Movie Review: Up the Down Staircase (1967) [HD]

COMMENTS

HBO's The Staircase is a Masterful, Stark True Crime Epic
Antonio Campos has accomplished more or less the same invigorating feat with HBO's new miniseries "The Staircase," which treats a true crime story with an incredible sense of style, urgency, and vision, all in support of a juicy, mega narrative that lives or dies on the integrity of its storyteller. "The Staircase" is both a masterful ...
The Staircase review
Happy families? … The Staircase. Photograph: Warner Brothers. The drama moves in and out of various timelines - 2017, the months (then weeks, then days, kept careful count of in the corner of ...
Review: 'The Staircase' Defies Expectations
A review of the HBO Max series 'The Staircase,' a scripted version of the docuseries about Michael Peterson, played by Colin Firth, who is accused of killing his wife Kathleen, played by Toni ...
'The Staircase' review: An HBO series revisits the Michael Peterson
In 2001, Kathleen Peterson was found dead in her Durham, N.C., home. Her husband, Michael, was accused of her murder, and a Netflix documentary followed. Now, a new HBO Max series revisits the case.
The Staircase review
Those bare facts are intriguing, but they are just a tiny part of why The Staircase is a crime documentary to rival any of the genre's biggest hits. Netflix's 13-parter comprises eight ...
HBO Max's 'The Staircase' Is So Much More Than a Reenactment
April 27, 2022 3:01 AM EDT. D on't come to The Staircase expecting certainty. French filmmaker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade's Peabody-winning documentary series, which originally aired in 2004 ...
'The Staircase' review: Exploitative true crime at its best and worst
HBO Max's 2022 "The Staircase" is a true crime drama based on the documentary of the Kathleen (Toni Collette) and Michael Peterson (Colin Firth) murder trial.
The Staircase (TV Mini Series 2022)
The Staircase: Created by Antonio Campos. With Colin Firth, Toni Collette, Michael Stuhlbarg, Patrick Schwarzenegger. Tells the story of Michael Peterson, a crime novelist accused of killing his wife Kathleen after she is found dead at the bottom of a staircase in their home, and the 16-year judicial battle that followed.
The Staircase Review: A Compelling Companion Piece to the Documentary
The Staircase ultimately does something intriguing in that it makes the filming of the documentary a focal point of its story (Lestrade does serve as one of the new show's producers), and for ...
The Staircase Review: Was It Murder, Or An Accident?
Published May 6, 2022. Colin Firth stars in The Staircase, a true crime story about a novelist whose wife is found dead. Max. On an unassuming street in the historic district of Forest Hills ...
'I was literally shocked': the true story behind new TV drama The Staircase
A woman lies dying in a pool of blood at the bottom of a staircase. Her husband, a novelist, calls 911. It is 2.40am. "My wife had an accident," says a frantic Michael Peterson.
'The Staircase' Review: Colin Firth in HBO Max True Crime Drama
The Staircase. The Bottom Line Rises above the true-crime trend. Airdate: Thursday, May 5 (HBO Max) Cast: Colin Firth, Toni Collette, Michael Stuhlbarg, Juliette Binoche, Dane DeHaan, Olivia ...
The Staircase Review: Colin Firth, Toni Collette Series on HBO Max
HBO Max. Eight episodes (five screened for review). Production: Executive producers: Antonio Campos, Maggie Cohn. Cast: Colin Firth, Toni Collette, Michael Stuhlbarg, Juliette Binoche , Dane ...
Review
The original "Staircase" doc chronicled — eventually for 16 years — the travails of Michael Peterson, a novelist and failed mayoral candidate in Durham, N.C., accused of killing his wife ...
'The Staircase' review: Colin Firth stars in an HBO Max series that
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 case itself. While the episodes ...
The Staircase: Limited Series
Oct 3, 2022 Full Review Prahlad Srihari Firstpost As far as true-crime stories go, The Staircase is a doozy. A Schroeder stairs-meets-Schrödinger's cat of a mystery. A Schroeder stairs-meets ...
HBO's 'The Staircase': A drama about a docuseries with no clear ...
It stars Colin Firth as Michael Peterson, the Durham, NC writer who was convicted of the murder of his wife, Kathleen, and became the subject of a popular 2004 documentary series also called The ...
The Staircase
The Staircase. Watch The Staircase with a subscription on Max, or buy it on Vudu, Prime Video, Apple TV. Exploring the life of Michael Peterson, his sprawling N.C. family, and the suspicious death ...
The Staircase review: A crime drama that loses its footing
The Staircase is a true-crime thriller that does not tell the true story behind the crime at the center of its plot. That's because the crime in question remains shrouded in mystery. The case ...
'The Staircase' HBO Max Review: Stream It Or Skip It?
Peterson, a novelist who is running for mayor of Durham, discovered his wife Kathleen (Toni Collette) at the bottom of the back stairs, barely breathing, at least according to him. Five minutes ...
The Staircase Review: Colin Firth Is Michael Peterson in HBO ...
Colin Firth plays Michael Peterson in this limited series that also dramatizes the making of the true crime doc about his case. HBO Max. Jesse Hassenger. April 27, 2022 @ 6:00 AM. True crime folds ...
'The Staircase' (HBO Max) Review: Series Looks Beyond ...
HBO Max's "The Staircase", based on the seminal true-crime docuseries, balances fact and fiction by conceding the unknowable gap in-between.
'The Staircase' Review: Netflix Makes An Old True Crime Doc New ...
Our The Staircase review examines Netflix's latest true crime obsession - a 2004 mystery docu-series updated with new episodes. ... Rudolf turns to the camera and quips, "Your movie just got a ...
The First Omen Review: Prequel Goes Hard as Hell
But The First Omen is an exceedingly successful first feature, and an invigorating film within a genre's increasingly limp mainstream. Director: Arkasha Stevenson. Writer: Tim Smith, Arkasha ...
How Does '3 Body Problem' Set Up a Season 2?
Season 2 of 3 Body Problem is still not confirmed by Netflix, but there is a lot of story for the show to tell still. Saul Durand struggles to understand his role as a Wallfacer amid threats ...
The Faceless Lady Review: Meta & Eli Roth's VR Series Is a ...
Unlike schlocky horror films embracing gimmicky technology — such as the notoriously low-rent 3D of "Friday the 13th Part III" — "The Faceless Lady" doesn't throw things at the ...
'What Jennifer Did' Netflix Review: The Girl Who Plotted to Kill Her
What Jennifer Did revisits the horrifying tale of Jennifer Pan, who became the subject of Canadian headlines when she survived a home invasion that took the life of her mother Bich and left her ...
Suspect arrested in alleged arson at Bernie Sanders' Vermont office
Jose Luis Magana/AP. Authorities arrested a man Sunday in connection with an alleged arson at Sen. Bernie Sanders' office in Vermont last week, according to the Justice Department. Shant ...

Movie Reviews

Latest blog posts

Ape Shall Not Kill Ape: A Look at the Entire Apes Franchise

​Criterion Celebrates the Films That Forever Shifted Our Perception of Kristen Stewart​

The Estate of George Carlin Destroys AI George Carlin in Victory for Copyright Protection (and Basic Decency)

The Future of the Movies, Part 3: Fathom Events CEO Ray Nutt

Simon Abrams

The Old Oak

Girls State

The People's Joker

Mary & George

Sheila O'Malley

The Staircase Defies Expectations

Most Viewed Stories

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

Sign In To Continue Reading

HBO Max’s The Staircase Is So Much More Than a Rehash of the Classic True-Crime Docuseries

More Must-Reads From TIME

You May Also Like

The Staircase

More like this

Did you know

User reviews 216

Technical specs

Related news

More to explore

Recently viewed

The Staircase Review: Was It Murder, Or An Accident?

A Murder on a Staircase

Colin Firth Delivers One of His Best Roles

Finding Justice in Tragedy

‘I was literally shocked’: the true story behind new TV drama The Staircase

Most viewed

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

site categories

Daniel Fienberg

The Staircase

Related Stories

THR Newsletters

More from The Hollywood Reporter

‘The Staircase’ has more twists than the true-crime doc it’s based on

Pop Culture Happy Hour

'The Staircase': A drama about a docuseries about a 20-year-old murder case

There's too much TV to keep up. Have we hit the limit?

We unpack the 'Ozark' finale

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Email not verified

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

Movies / TV

The Staircase

Cast & Crew

Popular TV on Streaming

The Staircase review: A crime drama that loses its footing

Exploitative at its worst

Editors' Recommendations

More From Decider

'Captain America: The Winter Soldier' at 10: The Movie That Made (and...

Joy Behar Says She Was "Dragged Into" Controversy Over Beyoncé's 'Jolene'...

Guy Fieri Calls Drew Barrymore "Gangster" For Talking With Her "Mouth Full...

Anna Paquin Shuts Down Hoda Kotb's Questions About Her Health On 'Today'...

'9-1-1' And 'The Bachelor' Crossover: Joey Graziadei And Jesse Palmer Make...

Holly Madison Names “Major Movie Stars” Who Started As Exotic Dancers...

'The View's Whoopi Goldberg Blasts Republicans For "Stupid" Question...

R.I.P. Chance Perdomo: ‘Gen V’ & ‘Chilling Adventures Of...

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Staircase’ On HBO Max, Where Colin Firth Plays Michael Peterson, Who Is Accused Of Murdering His Wife

Where to Stream:

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Cult Justice’ on Hulu, A True Crime Series Focusing On Cult Leaders, How They Were Caught, And The Voices Of Their Victims

THE STAIRCASE : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Does 'Yellowstone' Return Tonight? Everything To Know About 'Yellowstone's Season 5, Part 2 Premiere Date

Will There Be A 'Resident Alien' Season 4? What We Know

New Shows & Movies To Watch This Weekend: 'Mary & George' on Starz + More

Dwayne Johnson Gets Into Verbal Altercation With WWE Fan: "Watch Your F**king Mouth"

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Tearsmith’ on Netflix, An Italian Teen Romance Based On A Popular Novel

'9-1-1's Harry Grant Returns In Season 7: Why Marcanthonee Reis Was Recast

‘The Staircase’ Review: HBO Max Drama Puts a Narrative Twist on a True-Crime Docuseries

‘The Staircase’ Review: Colin Firth Slays in HBO Max’s Sly Study of Why We Assign Guilt and Innocence

Most Popular

'The Staircase' Review: Netflix Makes An Old True Crime Doc New Again

What Happened to Kathleen Peterson?

Criterion Celebrates the Films That Forever Shifted Our Perception of Kristen Stewart