WINDING STAIRCASE
New series has more twists than the truecrime documentary miniseries it's based on
The Staircase Crave
Sometimes it feels like the only stories Hollywood is interested in telling anymore are the ones we already know.
In prestige television today, the go-to source material is true crime, most narrativized already by journalists, podcasters and documentarians. 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 lacklustre standard, the dramatization of The Staircase — based on the French docuseries of the same name — 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 defence 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.
Colin Firth and Toni Collette star as empty nesters Michael and Kathleen, whose blended family of seven include 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.)
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 soulmate 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). 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 — Firth is fantastic at revealing how quickly his character can flit between pragmatism and casual cruelty.
It's unfortunate 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-onthe-wall precursor.
It's impossible to know where this sweeter yet potentially troubling development will go, 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 rival the bizarre swerves in the homicide case itself.
But the series' greatest letdown is its minimal sense of the setting. Durham is “a big town that feels small,” says de Lestrade, but 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.