TV review: I watched The Staircase and changed my mind on his guilt about five times, and that was just in the first half-hour
The Staircase further explores the life of Michael Peterson, his sprawling North Carolina family, and the suspicious death of his wife, Kathleen Peterson.
(Sky Atlantic, Thursdays 9pm and NOW TV app) isn’t a whodunnit. It’s a did-he-do-it?
And, spoiler alert, we still don’t know what happened in this real-life case. Michael Peterson was convicted of his wife’s Kathleen bloody murder in 2003. The police reckoned he did it , while he insisted s he fell down the stairs.
The ensuing trial was captured in a documentary featuring the real-life Peterson. A follow-up documentary on Netflix in 2018 , also called , charted the eye-catching twists and turns that came out during and after this trial (there’s talk that an owl did it.) It’s the best true crime documentary I’ve ever seen, given the access we have to Peterson and his kids.
So, can a dramatisation work as well? Yes, judging by the way the story is told in the first episode.
It helps that Peterson is played by an actor as good as Colin Firth, who captures the vanity, charm and self-regard of his subject. Toni Collette’s Kathleen is funny and warm, thanks perhaps to the glass of wine that seems welded to her hand.
The kids in their blended family include a star turn from Sophie Turner; a lead prosecutor is played by Parker Posey — it’s a good cast and it shows.
You couldn’t write a better story. Peterson is a successful novelist and they live in a giant mansion. He’s been a thorn in the side of city hall in Durham, and the local police force, which gives him a reason to think they’re coming after him. Peterson is bisexual — something which the prosecution suggests is a sign of a dodgy character.
Most of the kids are on his side during the trial. Kathleen’s sisters, on the other hand, are convinced he did it. I changed my mind on his guilt about five times, and that was just in the first half-hour.
The story unfolds across three timelines. It starts with Peterson waking up in 2017 and getting dressed for some kind of big day before we flashback to December 2001 and the 911 call he made to report that his wife had fallen down the stairs. There are also flashbacks from that point, so we can see what Toni Collette’s Kathleen was like.
It’s telling that the writers show her drinking in almost every scene, suggesting they are on board with the notion that she had one too many and fell down the stairs. The cops and prosecution team are given sinister hair-cuts and evil-eye stares, which cements the notion that we are on Team Michael. You can make up your own mind.
But it’s not just the conundrum which makes a compelling watch. The tensions between siblings, half-siblings and aunts are the emotional engine of this story, both in the documentary and here.
I was apprehensive about watching the dramatisation of this story. I reckoned the documentary had everything, and that this would just spoil the memory. But the acting and story-telling is superb — I’m looking forward to sitting through this story one more time.
