By 
Television has felt especially behind the times of late, which you'll have noticed if you've recently found yourself watching something, only to realise it's actually just the podcast that you gave up on last year after two episodes.
The latest sign that the small screen is eating itself comes in the form of The Staircase, an HBO dramatisation of the cult true crime docuseries, erm, The Staircase. The series returns to the trial of Micheal Peterson, the American novelist turned politician who, in 2001, was accused of murdering his wife, Kathleen. In early December 2001, Peterson called the police to say he had discovered her bloodied body at the foot of a flight of stairs in their sprawling home in Durham, North Carolina. How she made it there has been the subject of intense scrutiny and obsessive speculation ever since.
HBO's glossy update is just the most recent in the many television lives of the Michael Peterson story. The original French series, Soupçons, meaning 'suspicions', came from writer and director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade and aired in 2004, trailing Peterson in the lead up to the trial and bearing witness to the twists and turns of the case when it reached court. Then, between 2012 and 2013, Lestrade filmed Peterson and his family for a two hour sequel which unearthed new developments in the case, but it wasn't until 2018, when Netflix added the entire 13 episodes of the documentary, that the story really came to the attention of sofa sleuths and armchair detectives the world over.
The poster for Netflix's The Staircase, which can claim a not insignificant part in the true crime TV boom of the last ten years, featured the words DID HE DO IT? running down Peterson's face, and, as is customary in the genre, the flip-flopping over his innocence or guilt is the central question of The Staircase's many versions.
In the latest iteration of The Staircase – or the most recent flight, should we say, which airs on Sky Atlantic early next month – having more distance from the story allows for new possibilities and perspectives to creep in. It's a drama that has all the hallmarks of yet another TV show that did not need to be made, but it manages to defy the trend of overly familiar television thanks to its excellent performances and alluring narrative structure; bookending the first episode with scenes of an unfamiliar, greying Peterson, and interweaving the two simultaneous timelines of life before and after that night in December 2001.
The 2022 take on the story has an excellent cast, namely Colin Firth, who nails Peterson's furrowed brow and nasal drawl, and Toni Collette as his wife Kathleen, who swings from being sweet and congenial to wildly unpredictable in a single glance. Creator Antonio Campos even brings the documentary's director Lestrade into the drama as a character, widening the scope of the story to show how the subject for the original documentary was chosen to illustrate a complete picture of the American justice system.
As a drama, The Staircase is able to take a longer view on proceedings than the 2004 doc and Netflix follow-up, allowing the audience to view the shaken and suspicious post-September 11th atmosphere that swirled in late 2001 with the benefit of hindsight.
Free of the constraints of having to submit evidence to the audience and build a case in the way documentaries are often obliged to, The Staircase as a drama is instead able to play with our expectations of the story. In one memorable moment, a sequence of Kathleen tumbling down the stairs at first seems designed to give credibility to the defence's argument, but soon demonstrates just how implausible their reasons for her injuries really are, morphing into a ridiculous and gory spectacle that rivals Collette's work in horror Hereditary.
Admittedly, there is an argument to be made that using recognisable faces, dialling the tension up with an eerie soundtrack, and filling in the gaps of a story that already betters fiction for its eccentricities and head-scratching details, somewhat misses the point of the original. True is the operative word in true crime, after all.
HBO's The Staircase does feel a world away from the French documentary which first inspired the story, with dramatic flourishes like Kathleen's jumping into the family pool fully clothed at an empty nest party they hosted. In isolation these details could be seen as creating a picture of her from hearsay, rather than relying on hard facts, but Campos's The Staircase is disciplined enough to avoid leaning too far in either direction on its characters.
For completists of the Peterson case, who already know their owl theory from their blow poke theory, there might be frustration to be found in this slick and compressed retelling, but at a time when television has started to feel like a chore of 15-or-so hour-long episodes, each moving their way sluggishly through vaguely familiar news stories, The Staircase instead feels alluringly freewheeling and broad in its scope, zipping between different timeframes and perspectives. Though it keeps a watchful eye on the facts of the case, it's one true tale that is all the better for not letting the truth get in the way of a good story.
'The Staircase' is available on Sky Atlantic and Now TV from 5 May
