In "The Staircase," Kathleen Peterson (Toni Collette) falls. Later, we see her fall again and again. We see the violence from multiple angles, in present time and reenacted by investigators trying to figure out what happened, what killed the woman who died in 2001 and if her husband, writer Michael Peterson, had anything to do with it.
But in the first episode of the HBO Max series, we see the aftermath of the violence in difficult, lingering detail for the first time (there will be other times). We see the body, its stillness, its horrible silence. And it looks real.
