The Staircase

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 ...

There's also the issue of how prosecutors leveraged that information, recognizing how it might play to a jury in 2003. (Netflix, notably, revisited the original 2004 series in 2018 The result is a production that constantly seems to be reassessing what we know, versus what we might think or assume, about what transpired.

How did The Staircase filmmakers' relationship with Michael affect the original 2004 docuseries? HBO Max's adaptation attempts to find out with a meta story ...

“The problem with any subject, as Maggie said, is that once you put on the camera, are you getting the real person?” adds Campos. “Are you getting someone performing? Playing devil’s advocate, Campos counters, “And I would argue that a good documentarian has to get close to a subject, to a certain degree, to get them to open up. Asked whether Campos had conversations about filmmaker-subject distance with de Lestrade, Campos says, “I think that Jean would argue that he was able to maintain his distance enough to know when Michael was putting on a show for the camera and when he felt like he was being more genuine. I got a very small taste of what that’s like to try to keep up that boundary…it’s very difficult, or it was for me.” I mean, I was in a three-hour conversation and I was struggling with it,” says Cohn. “So imagine, over the course of two years, trying to keep that separation and that distance when you’re so intimately connected. The fireplace tool, which mysteriously reappeared after an extensive search, was central to an episode in the original series titled “The Blowpoke Returns.” But Campos said that seeing the uncut footage from that plot twist gave him additional insight into Michael, who is played on the new miniseries by Colin Firth.

The notorious documentary series about the death of an author's wife gets a star-packed fictionalisation that is practically fizzing with tension.

The former is slippery and arrogant, putting in a performance that teeters on so many brinks – deeply loving yet coercive with family, paralysed with grief yet sociopathically detached, self-indulgent yet narcissistic – that you cannot help watching to see if and which way he will fall. As evidence against Michael grows – if not probative of murder, then at least of the fact that he is not quite the man they thought he was – the family begins to fracture. It skates close to becoming disorientating – particularly when Lestrade (Vincent Vermignon) and his documentary team turn up to make their film – but the timeline-hopping generally adds to the growing tension. The subsequent investigation revealed a millefeuille of layers to the man, the family and the story. Then we move back again to a few months before, when Michael, Kathleen (Toni Collette) and their children/wards (one from Kathleen’s previous relationship, four from Michael’s) have gathered for a family dinner and college send-off for one of them. He claimed he found her at the foot of the stairs she had fallen down while drunk and cradled her as he called the emergency services and she breathed her last.

Originally a classic true-crime documentary series, the case of Michael Peterson makes for a gripping series.

Much married, he was, at one point, in league with judges and U.S. social security officials, and part of the thrust of the story is the sheer complexity of the government system and the inadequate oversight. Also note the arrival of The Big Conn (streams AppleTV+), a four part docu-series that is, yes, about a scam artist. It opens the story out to present Kathleen (Toni Collette) as a woman weary of nurturing a blended family – her kids and Michael’s – and mentally racked by knowing about her husband’s other life as a bisexual with male lovers. As the trial and then retrial go on and on, the family splinters, with some remaining loyal to Michael and others at first suspicious and then repulsed. The Staircase (HBO, streams Crave) is new, a dramatization of the case. What happened to Peterson on a December night in 2001 has been the focus of much scrutiny.

HBO's new Sky Atlantic drama has reignited interest in the Mr and Mrs Peterson murder case.

Mr Peterson was the last person to see her alive. A friend of the Petersons in Germany, her body was found at the bottom of a staircase with a coroner deeming her death to have been as a result of a haemorrhage, which caused her to fall down the stairs. The Petersons had dinner with Ratliff and her daughters that night, but Mr Peterson stayed to help put her children to bed. A case which saw twists unravel and revelations unveiled, Mr Peterson was ultimately convicted of his wife's murder after finding her at the bottom of the family home's stairs. This is despite Kathleen and her children she had with Michael reportedly accepting his sexuality. It concluded she had died from blood loss ninety minutes to two hours after sustaining the injuries.

Based on the acclaimed documentary series, The Staircase is about Michael Peterson, a crime novelist, is ac...

Distant from the group, Wickie (Renée Elise Goldsberry) lives a perfect life on Instagram, where she advertises her boss-babe entrepreneur's life. As the girls work to survive as castaways and learn about each other, they are unaware that they're really subjects of a social experiment. Season 2 ups the drama and keeps you guessing. What: The Wilds follows a group of teenage girls from different backgrounds who are on a flight to Hawaii for the Dawn of Eve program, a young women's empowerment retreat. From Saturday Night Live to writing and creating 30 Rock, Mean Girls and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the star can do no wrong. For many of us, this was the first full ordinary week in a long time.

Privilege, legal wrangling and violent death in a handsome eight-part package: Vogue reviews 'The Staircase' on HBO and Sky Atlantic, starring Colin Firth ...

But the combination of marquee names, auteur production, and potboiler plotting has proved irresistible. The Staircase shares a title and subject with the award-winning 2005 television documentary series by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade. That Staircase, which aired on Canal+, the BBC, and the Sundance Channel and now can be found (with its less successful sequel episodes) on Netflix, has become a kind of ur-text of the true crime boom. Sharp Objects, The Undoing, Mare of Easttown: none of these could plausibly be called art, and if you took away the A-listers involved (the Nicoles, the Kates, the Amys) you might ignore them entirely.

It stars Colin Firth as novelist Michael Peterson, and Toni Collette as his wife, Kathleen.

You will be treated as guilty for murdering my sister Kathleen, and you will be a convicted felon forever.” It just didn’t happen," he said at the time. “It’s been a long and winding road, but well worth the wait... “Michael Peterson, you are pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter. Peterson still wears his wedding ring, and claimed at the time of his release that he had tried not to be bitter about the years he had spent fighting the case. His release came after a judge ordered a new trial after it was discovered that one of the key witnesses against Peterson had given "deliberately false" testimony.

The Staircase tells the case of Michael Peterson, but where can you watch the original documentary that inspired and is part of the Colin Firth-led series?

All episodes of The Staircase documentary made their way onto Netflix in 2018. Michael Balderston is a DC-based entertainment and assistant managing editor for What to Watch, who has previously written about the TV and movies with TV Technology, Awards Circuit and regional publications. The filmmakers reportedly spent hundreds of hours with Peterson. In a Vulture article, de Lestrade adds that after a few months of filming, the prosecution cut off their access. This really did happen, with a docuseries also called The Staircase first released in 2004. The Staircase stars Colin Firth as Peterson, Toni Collettte as Kathleen Peterson, as well as Sophie Turner, Michael Stuhlbarg, Rosemarie DeWitt, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Parker Posey and Juliette Binoche. The Staircase 2004 documentary is currently available to stream on Netflix in both the US and the UK.

The new HBO show stars Colin Firth as Michael Peterson, the writer who was convicted of his wife Kathleen's murder.

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Colin Firth and Toni Collette lead a harrowing drama about the 2004 docuseries of the same name.

But the rich realism of their fraught partnership generally works well, providing a deep pool of conflict from which the rest of the show springs. So it’s a testament to Campos’ strong direction that the first five episodes deliver a consistently fresh presentation of the case’s main players. Positioning Lestrade and executive producer Denis Poncet (Frank Feys) as dubious central figures in the Petersons’ story, this nonlinear reexamination is as much about a possible murder as it is society’s insidious fascination with horrible tragedies. Not only did The Staircase get two more episodes from Lestrade in 2012, but Netflix revived it again with three more chapters in 2018. When Michael was indicted in his wife’s murder the following year, French filmmaker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade (Vincent Vermignon) was given permission to document his defense in an artful, if controversial, 2004 miniseries of the same name. Almost. Created by Antonio Campos (The Devil All The Time), this riveting drama about the mysterious death of Kathleen Peterson will succeed or fail based on its conclusion.

The limited HBO Max miniseries stars Colin Firth as crime novelist Michael Peterson, who was accused of murdering his wife, Kathleen (Toni Collette).

You can also watch Discovery’s three-part series on Discovery+ or buy it on Vudu for $5. The HBO Max miniseries is based on Oscar-winning French filmmakers Jean-Xavier de Lestrade and Denis Poncet’s documentary series Soupçons (which translates to “Suspicions”), which was first released in eight episodes. While the streamer doesn’t offer a trial period, you can watch The Staircase for free when you sign up for a new subscription to Hulu, which comes with the first month free.

For those not in the know, The Staircase follows the story of Kathleen Peterson's (Toni Collette) death, and the subsequent arrest and trial of her husband, ...

Regardless of how you feel about the criminal justice system, Michael Peterson, or the tabloidization of crime in this era, The Staircase is a gripping drama. Both sides of the case attempt to untangle the Gordian knot of the Peterson family. Some of the more cerebral parts of the Peterson story (like our criminal justice system’s deeply flawed inner workings) are shunted aside in favor of the family drama. The emotional exhaustion of being a wife, mother, and breadwinner of the extensive family shows in the tense set of her shoulders and in the lost, faraway look she gets when no one is looking. Some facts of the case that seemed damning in 2001–like the revelation of Peterson’s bisexuality–don’t quite hit with the same oomph to the 2022 viewer. As a result, it became the subject of a documentary (also titled The Staircase) by French filmmaker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade. In a way, creator Antonio Campos has created a nesting doll of storytelling with this compelling–if somewhat sensationalized–adaptation.