The Staircase’s Finale Ends a Familiar Story With a Surprising Twist
Its documentary predecessor was exhaustive, but there’s one thing only fiction can do
When Kathleen Peterson, a Nortel executive, was found dead at the bottom of a staircase in the Durham, North Carolina, mansion that she shared with her husband, novelist Michael Peterson, it has been more than 20 years. Her death has always been shrouded in mystery, and investigators are still searching for answers. The medical examiner ruled Peterson's death a homicide despite her claims that she had fallen. Michael Peterson had known another woman who fell to her death, and the fact that he was raising her two children fueled public interest in the conflict between Peterson and his wife's wealth and sexual encounters with men during their marriage.
Kathleen Peterson's life ended that night in December 2001, but the true crime story that grew out of her absence was just getting started, unfolding mostly as a sensational did-he-or-didn't-he? Until a French documentary crew used Michael's indictment for Kathleen's murder as an opportunity to create a compelling portrait of the accused, a work that indicted the criminal justice system itself, this domestic violence story was worthy of a rough and ready Dateline treatment.
The Staircase, an eight-part docuseries that debuted in 2004 and followed Michael Peterson's trial and conviction, followed him for years
Both in 2011 when Peterson won the right to have his trial redone due to evidence that a blood analysis expert had falsified his testimony and in 2017 when Peterson struck a deal with the Durham District Attorney's office, pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter via an Alford plea, a deal allowing him to admit guilt while maintaining his innocence and walking free after his sentence was reduced to time served.
The Staircase, an HBO limited series from showrunners Antonio Campos and Maggie Cohn, has picked up the story five years after it ended in a tie. It aims to balance the scales of the narrative by dramatising the conflicting theories about how Kathleen died, not by taking a defined point of view on what exactly happened that night. Additionally, we see the late-stage "owl theory"—that Kathleen died not from a fall or a beating, but rather from an owl attack—depicted in the drama. Because of this Staircase, we get a vast compilation of Peterson stories, a big unwieldy universe of fictional possibilities that range from guilt and innocence, love and violence, tragedy and cliche.
Starting with its award-winning namesake as a starting point, the drama begins by complicating the authority of those telling the story of the docuseries' storytellers. In a smart twist, the documentary's point of view is shifted away from Michael (Colin Firth) and into a new perspective. For the first few episodes, Sophie Brunet appears as an enigmatic white woman dressed in a white dress.
Sophie is the one to keep an eye on, as she injects newness and suspense into a well-known story. There's a surprise in store for you in real life: Lestrade refers to Sophie as the "beating heart" of the documentary series, which we learn about only about halfway through the first season. Sophie is more than just Michael's girlfriend; she also serves as the show's editor. As a result of Sophie's relationship with Michael and the docuseries, we are compelled to degrade the ideal of truth to a simple competition between stories; a major editing-room dispute over whether to include a scene that de Lestrade feels deepens Michael as a character or one Poncet prefers, in which a medical examiner testifies that Kathleen's injuries make it certain that she was strangled. As part of the docuseries' long-form examination, this back-and-forth is less interesting than the other idea that Sophie's character advances: love is just another creation process which necessitates meticulous editing in order to work. With her work, Brunet's love for Peterson becomes entwined with it, and she fights to keep that vision intact even if it means abandoning the overall plot.
In the real world Publicly Brunet and de Lestrade have called these scenes fabrications and denounced the portrayal of their characters. It wasn't until the first instalment of the series had been completed that Brunot had any contact with Peterson. In a way, this lets Campos and Cohn both have their cake and eat it as far as real-life stories go, but it also means that the lies the show tells help establish a resonant truth: that being close to Michael's humanity—to his charisma, intelligence, and humor—makes it harder for some to see him as capable of harm.
When it comes to human beings, the police, the prosecution, and even Poncet have different perspectives. "Jean, I believe we all could" responds Poncet when de Lestrade asks if he believes the man they've known for years could kill someone he loved.
If the docuseries gave us a lot of Michael, the drama tries to make up for it by focusing on Kathleen, who acts as a counterweight to Michael's magnetic pull. Whatever you want to call it, the series does something no one else has: it paints a vivid picture of what it might have been like to be Kathleen Peterson. A Christmas she can't afford is one of many obstacles Kathleen must overcome over the course of eight hours as she juggles her work and home lives while also dealing with a bat-infested house that is yet another antagonist in her life. Even though she's depressed, we also see her having sex with her friends, dancing, and even laughing. We see her drink like Elizabeth Holmes drank green juice in order to maintain the facade of success she had created.
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