True-crime TV pioneer gets its final chapter
New episodes wrap up legal case, but clear answers remain elusive
Some Netflix subscribers who stumble across The Staircase might wonder if it was influenced by Making a Murderer,
The Jinx or The Keepers, which are just a few of the multipart crime documentaries that have captured the public’s attention in recent years.
Actually, it’s the other way around. The Staircase, which debuted in America in 2005 and gets an update Friday on Netflix, helped create the modern template for true-crime TV, a booming subgenre that shows no signs of slowing down (and even generated its own pitchperfect parody, Netflix’s American Vandal). Some of the influence is esthetic. As is the case with The Keepers or OJ: Made in Amer
ica, The Staircase is deliberate and quietly observational; it never relies on an exploitative tone or a prurient approach to achieve its goals. In at least one case, the influence goes even deeper. According to press notes for The Staircase, a few years ago, its director, JeanXavier de Lestrade, consulted with one of the creators of Mak
ing a Murderer, which has a number of tonal, structural and thematic elements in common with the earlier documentary.
Perhaps “earlier” isn’t the most accurate adjective: The
Staircase is now both old and new. It chronicles the years of legal travails that followed the death of the telecom executive Kathleen Peterson, who met her end in late 2001 at the bottom of a set of stairs in her wellappointed home in Durham, N.C. Her novelist husband, Michael Peterson, was charged with her murder. The compulsively binge-able 13-part Netflix series is a collection of three different stages of the tale: The original eight-part series tracking the case and trial, which aired on SundanceTV in 2005; a two-part update from 2013; and three new episodes produced for Netflix.
The final instalment does indeed wrap up the legal aspects of the story. But the knotty, am- biguous elements of The Staircase, which clearly influenced many later documentaries and were even mined by a number of scripted dramas, are likely to linger in the viewer’s mind. The question of whether Kathleen Peterson’s death was the result of a murder or a horrible accident is unlikely to ever be settled to the satisfaction of everyone connected to the case. Her sisters, a small but vocal part of the documentary, are clear they think she was killed. Four of her family’s children stuck by Michael Peterson through many dark days, but her daughter from a previous marriage sat on the prosecution’s side of the courtroom.
Which faction is right? The Staircase, which focuses on whether Michael Peterson was treated fairly by the legal system, doesn’t answer that question. In the show’s press kit, de Lestrade says, “I’m not sure I know more about Michael Peterson than the first day I met him.” Viewers may end up feeling the same way, even as they willingly travel down the rabbit hole of the stranger-than-fiction Peterson case.
The Staircase stood out in 2005, that much is unambiguous. When it debuted, serious documentaries didn’t usually air on basic cable, and most had running times of around two hours. Unlike much cable-TV coverage of crime, then or now, it was deliberate and thorough. As a Frenchman, de Lestrade aimed partly to put the U.S. justice system under the micro- scope, as he had in his Oscarwinning 2001 documentary Murder on a Sunday Morning, which chronicled the case of a poor Black teen accused of killing a tourist in Florida.
Michael Peterson had far more money and resources than that defendant, but he had also been a newspaper columnist who had needled Durham politicians and prosecutors. It also emerged that he is bisexual, a fact prosecutors relentlessly used to imply that he could not be trusted, not just as a spouse but as a human. Without going into details that would spoil the show, other elements of the prosecution proved even more problematic. As one lawyer says late in the season, “It’s pretty devastating to see what can pass for science and justice in a courtroom.”
Despite de Lestrade’s compassionate approach, there are gruesome elements, and in lesser hands, The Staircase could have been a vehicle for crude voyeurism. Instead, the series is infused by a sense of intelligent curiosity and unforced immediacy.
There’s an element of luck at play — there’s no way de Lestrade could have seen some of the case’s most jaw-dropping twists coming — but he deftly folds even the most shocking developments into measured episodes that rarely wander or overstay their welcomes.
And despite the grief at its heart, The Staircase never lapses into grimness or plodding pessimism.