The Staircase may be “the true crime series to end them all”

Oscar winner Colin Firth (The King’s Speech) and Oscar nominee Toni Collette (Unbelievable, The Sixth Sense) were nominated for Outstanding Actor and Actress in a Limited Series at this year’s Emmys for the acclaimed true-crime series The Staircase, now streaming on Showmax.

The eight-part mini-series is inspired by real events, telling the story of Michael Peterson, a crime novelist who was accused of killing his wife Kathleen after she was found dead at the bottom of the staircase in their home in 2001.

Widely publicised over the course of the 16-year judicial battle that followed, the Petersons’ story has already been the subject of a Peabody Award-winning docuseries of the same name – which also becomes part of the new series.

While the makers of the original documentary have criticised aspects of the show, it’s received rave reviews from critics and audiences alike. The Staircase was one of the Most Anticipated Series of 2022 on Rotten Tomatoes, where it has a 93% critics’ rating. Variety praises it as “a fascinating look at guilt, innocence and image,” while The Guardian hails it as “riveting… practically fizzing with tension… If you didn’t know it was true, you wouldn’t believe it.”

In addition to its leads, the mini-series boasts a star-studded cast that includes Oscar winner Juliette Binoche (Chocolat), Emmy nominees Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones) and Michael Stuhlbarg (Boardwalk Empire), Teen Choice nominee Patrick Schwarzenegger (Midnight Sun), MTV Movie & TV Award nominee Parker Posey (Scream 3), BAFTA nominee Dane DeHaan (ZeroZeroZero), Olivia DeJonge (Priscilla in Elvis) and Cullen Moss (The Righteous Gemstones, Your Honor).

If you think you know the story, you don’t know the story. Rather than shy away from the unresolved questions and inconsistencies, The Staircase approaches the case from multiple perspectives, including one of the more bizarre theories around the case, which contends that an owl attack could have precipitated Kathleen’s fall.

“So much of it is like, ‘What?!’” says Collette. “That’s the beauty of the show. You’re constantly guessing, and you fully believe in a certain idea, and then the ground falls away and you’re left wondering how you could have been so foolish.”

By coming at the story from multiple angles, the show invites the audience into the investigation, but that’s not the only way The Staircase goes beyond a straight-up dramatisation of the newsreels. “This nonlinear reexamination,” AV Club says, “is as much about a possible murder as it is society’s insidious fascination with horrible tragedies.”

At its core a family drama, the series also looks at what happens to that family’s story when it goes out into the world, not only during the court case, but through the lens of the documentary team following their story.

In doing so, Vanity Fair argues, “The Staircase may be the truest crime series we’ve got.” Calling it, “the true-crime series to end them all,” they praise the show’s “willingness to question and doubt—and to guide its audience into this mode of investigation and introspection—that elevates The Staircase above many of its based-on-a-real-case television brethren.”

“The mystery,” Firth told TV Insider, “for me – and I think it’s full of mystery and twists and turns and unpredictability – wasn’t dependent on the whodunnit. It wasn’t dependent on the case, it wasn’t dependent on speculation or evidence of what may or may not have happened, it was about the mystery of human beings in the community of a family, and what we can understand, what we can really know about each other.”