HBO’s The Staircase Is a Slow, Tired Retread of a Terrible True Crime
Photo Courtesy of HBO
Why, in 2022, is the story of Michael Peterson supposed to be interesting?
If you’re unfamiliar, Peterson was a writer who may or may not have murdered his wife Kathleen in Durham, NC in 2001 by bludgeoning her with some object, possibly strangling her, and throwing her down the stairs after she died. He was convicted at trial and served eight years in prison before a judge granted him a new trial, and in 2017 he took an Alford plea and no longer faced any threat of serving further jail time.
There are a few ways to answer the question of why it might still be interesting now. First, you might say the crime itself is fascinating/titillating/whatever. Second, you could point to his fame. Third, the possibility that he murdered his wife because she discovered his bisexuality. Fourth, and I think most likely, is the existence of the Peabody Award-winning 2004 documentary The Staircase, which had intimate access to Peterson and the trial proceedings, and was an influential work when it was released.
As to the first three points, while they may have been vaguely true at the time, they’re a tough sell now. The crime itself is not novel; unfortunately, spousal killings are distressingly common, they happen by the thousands each year, and that alone isn’t enough to distinguish the Peterson case as exceptional more than 20 years later. Fame is a misdirection; Peterson wasn’t very famous even after 2001. I lived in Durham, NC at that time, and though I was a self-absorbed college student, I do think it’s notable that I don’t have a single memory of hearing Michael Peterson’s name between 2001 and 2003. As a writer, he wasn’t anything close to a household name, and the truly “famous” part of his life came after the release of The Staircase. Finally, the sexuality angle: Peterson was having affairs with other men, and Kathleen may have found out, and this may have led to a murder, but none of this is conclusive; and frankly, while it may have raised eyebrows in 2001, mores have changed even in the 20 years since, and it’s no longer a dynamic that will shock and compel a modern audience, if it ever was.
Which brings us back to the documentary. The reason it worked had a lot to do with access, a lot to do with the talent of filmmaker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, and even more to do with the fact that these were real people going through a real situation. Antonio Campos and Maggie Cohn’s task with dramatizing this event for HBO’s The Staircase (starring Colin Firth as Peterson and Toni Collette as Kathleen) was to recapture this immediacy after two decades and with a layer of fiction standing between the crime and the televised product.
Are there examples where that feat was pulled off successfully? In fact, yes, and we don’t have to look far. In The People vs. O.J Simpson, FX absolutely nailed it, but they had certain factors in their favor. For one thing, O.J. Simpson was legitimately famous, and they could trade on the fact that the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson really did captivate America. For another, strange as this is to say, they combined the urgent storytelling with a sense of humor which captured the absurdity of the entire spectacle, and what it said about the new celebrity-saturated era that it helped usher in. You couldn’t look away.