A riveting tale of an unsolved mystery
Amidst an apparently endless flood of true-crime series, what can possibly set any of them apart anymore? Well, a charming, wily murder suspect and a death that remains unexplained is a pretty unbeatable combination. That is the allure of the French documentary The Staircase, one of the first big successes in the genre. Still engrossing today, the series had astonishing access to Michael Peterson, accused of killing his wife, Kathleen, in their home in an upscale area of Durham, North Carolina. The same combination shapes the new HBO drama based on that documentary, with Colin Firth giving a sly, charismatic performance as Peterson, who in real life is now 78 and still maintains he is innocent of the crime.
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While the new series has the same title as the original, though, its tone more accurately reflects the documentary’s French title, Soupçons, or Suspicions. The non-fiction is sympathetic to Peterson and largely ignores the fact that the filmmakers are in the room. The fiction takes a more sceptical view and, widening the lens on the story, even includes the documentarians as characters. It’s an intelligent approach that almost works, but not as well as it should. A scattershot structure and a couple of underwritten major characters, including Kathleen (Toni Collette) and Peterson’s attorney, David Rudolf (Michael Stuhlbarg), make the show less taut and suspenseful than a crime story should be.
Fortunately, viewers are carried along by the first-rate cast and the intrigue of the unsolved mystery. Even now, 21 years later, no one can definitively say how Kathleen Peterson died. The prosecution claimed that Peterson was a liar and cheat who bludgeoned her to death. The defence said they had a lovely marriage and she died in a fall down a sharply-angled staircase. A reasonable conclusion, after watching the documentary, is that there are holes in both arguments.
In real life (slight spoilers in this paragraph), the documentary’s director, Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, started following Peterson not long after his arrest and continued through his trial and conviction, sitting in on strategy meetings with his legal team, talking to his four grown children, but mostly listening to Peterson, who makes a good case for himself. In 2013 and 2017, De Lestrade made two sequels, chronicling Peterson’s release after eight years in prison and the plea deal that set him free for good. Called an Alford plea, it’s a convenient wrinkle in the US justice system, an agreement that acknowledges there is enough evidence to make a conviction likely, even though the accused party does not admit guilt.
In addition to its more doubtful tone about all that, the fictional version fills in the backstory. It starts in 2017 when Peterson is about to go to court to finalise his plea, and quickly goes back to December 2001 when he makes a frantic emergency call, saying that his wife is unconscious. Throughout, the show flashes back to Kathleen and their family life, and forward to his legal battle.
Kathleen is a stressed-out executive who drinks so much that she once stumbles on that staircase – which, of course, doesn’t mean that’s how she eventually died. Collette isn’t given much to work with beyond that. Michael is a novelist whom we see very early on making a surreptitious call to a male escort, a fact the prosecutors later use to paint him as disreputable, even immoral. We come to see that he is a proven liar, who falsely claimed during a campaign for public office that he had won a Purple Heart for serving in Vietnam. Lying, of course, doesn’t make him a killer. Hmmm.
Platform: HBO Max
Number of episodes: Seven
Creators:
Antonio Campos
Maggie Cohn
Starring:
Colin Firth
Toni Collette
Parker Posey
Start date: 5 May
Firth is the ideal choice to play Peterson, trading on the character’s charm. In one of the best fictional scenes, Kathleen angrily calls him “the great dissembler”, capable of deflecting and talking his way out of almost anything. Firth also, subtly, keeps us off guard about what Michael might be thinking. His charm can leave a viewer feeling queasy. At the end of the first episode, he sits alone in his prison cell, and a look comes into his eye, a darkening glimmer sinister enough to hint that he’s guilty and playing everyone for fools, yet enigmatic enough that he could be expressing disdain for the criminal justice system that has wrongly accused him. There is so much going on around him, though – lawyers, family members, the film crew, the press, not to mention a long scene about a fireplace poker the prosecutors say is the murder weapon – that the series doesn’t focus on Firth’s nuanced performance enough.
Scene for scene, much of that activity works. Sophie Turner is a strong presence as Margaret, the older of the two daughters Peterson adopted after their mother died (that’s a whole other subplot and piece of evidence). Tim Guinee plays Peterson’s loyal brother, Bill, thoroughly convincing us they could be siblings. Parker Posey wisely doesn’t try to be likeable as the moralistic assistant district attorney who tells the jury that a good woman like Kathleen Peterson could not possibly have known about her husband’s sex life with men, which Peterson says she tacitly did. In the five episodes HBO made available (of seven), the death scene is depicted twice, once as Peterson says it happened, again as prosecutors speculate it did.
All this is laid out with stand-alone clarity. But there is a second, different audience of viewers who know the documentary and will be surprised at what was missing. The fictional version, for example, depicts Jean-Xavier (Vincent Vermignon) and his producer in Paris searching for the subject of their next film. The drama reveals what the documentary doesn’t, but which De Lestrade has since talked about in an interview. He planned to use the Peterson case to examine the justice system from both the prosecution’s and the defence’s points of view. It was only after the prosecutors stopped cooperating four months into the shoot that Peterson became the sole focus, presenting his story with little pushback.
There is even a third audience of people fascinated enough by the case to go down a rabbit hole of research. In the first episode, we briefly see Juliette Binoche as Sophie Brunet, Michael’s romantic partner in 2017. She is not in the documentary either, and don’t Google her unless you want a spoiler about how she met Peterson. That fact is revealed at the end of episode four and it is wild.
Well into the series, Sophie questions the idea of truth and objectivity. It’s a resonant issue, but one that the series so far doesn’t delve into deeply or dramatically enough. The prosecutor tells the jury: “This case is about pretence and appearances. It’s about things not being as they seem.” With the facts so elusive, that much at least seems true, one way or the other.
★★★☆☆
The Staircase premieres on 5 May on HBO Max in the US and Sky TV and NOW in the UK.
All 13 episodes of the documentary The Staircase are on Netflix.
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