The Staircase
SKY ATLANTIC/ NOW, Thursday 5 May, 9pm
Along with The Jinx and Making A Murderer, the original series The Staircase is arguably one of the all- time classic examples of the truecrime documentary. Made by French director Jean-xavier de Lestrade in 2004, with remarkable access to the real people involved, the series aired originally in the UK on BBC4, and told the extraordinary story of how on 9 December 2001, the novelist Michael Peterson made a 911 call to the police to report that his wife Kathleen had fallen down the staircase in their North Carolina home and died. But Peterson soon became the police’s prime suspect, and a lengthy legal case ensued, full of astonishing revelations. Now here’s the starstudded mini-series of the whole bizarre story…
DRAMA FROM TRAGEDY
One of the most amazing elements of the original docu-series was the extent to which Peterson himself, his extended family and his legal team, granted full access to the film crew as the case developed. There have also been myriad TV, radio, podcast and print examinations of the case – Netflix even commissioned new episodes of The Staircase series itself and made a 13-episode version of the whole saga available in 2018. So, you might be forgiven for wondering what else there is to say about the case. Well, showrunner Antonio Campos, who made the Netflix melodrama The Devil All The Time, has been working on this dramatic telling of the story since 2008, when Harrison Ford joined the project as exec producer and would-be star of the show. Ford dropped out, to be replaced by Colin Firth, and in came American Crime Story’s Maggie
Cohn as co-showrunner and writer. Reviews of their finished work are embargoed until after our press date, but they’ve clearly assembled an impressive team in front of and behind the camera.
CLASSY CAST
As well as the lead roles played by Colin Firth and Toni Collette et al (see right), the eight-part drama also features Parker Posey (Best In Show), Juliette Binoche (The English Patient) and Rosemary Dewitt (Poltergeist), and from what we’ve seen it’s going to be fascinating to watch them playing the real-life people involved, most of whom are still alive, as this intriguing drama series plays out.