We are so obsessed with true crime series that producers are now taking existing ones and remaking them.
The Staircase is already a gripping docu-series that you can find on Netflix, but a new incarnation on Sky Atlantic is a starry A-list dramatised version.
I wondered if it could add anything new, but with Colin Firth and Toni Collette heading up the cast, who wouldn’t watch?
Launching with a double bill on Thursday, the mini-series explores the life of writer and war veteran Michael Peterson (Firth with a distractingly non-Darcy accent and non-romcom role), his blended North Carolina family and the suspicious death of his wife, Kathleen.
It starts, as many murder mysteries do, at the end. On December 9, 2001, at 2.40am, Michael makes a frantic 911 call: “My wife, she had an accident. She fell down the stairs… she’s not breathing.”
Michael’s son Todd (Patrick Schwarzenegger, son of Arnie) arrives at the house to find police everywhere, his stepmother very much dead at the bottom of the stairs, blood everywhere (“as if her head exploded”, said a cop) and his father in an absolute state.
Todd had seen them together earlier that evening. “Were they arguing?” asks a cop. “No, they were drinking and laughing,” says Todd.
But the house is turned into a crime scene, then the district attorney brings murder charges, forcing the family to choose a version of events to believe.
A seemingly perfect blended family becomes very much splintered.
The action flashes back to September 2001, three months before Kathleen’s death, with Michael making a toast at the dinner table: “We’re not perfect but we stick together and we love each other.”
But did Kathleen really know who her husband was?
As the case becomes engulfed in a media circus, a French film crew arrives to chronicle its many twists and turns.
Also starring Michael Stuhlberg, Juliette Binoche and Rosemarie DeWitt, this is a fascinating portrait of grief and perspectives as well as an intriguing whodunit.
While you wonder throughout if Kathleen took a drunken tumble down the stairs or was bludgeoned by her husband, there is more to it than that.
It takes a great documentary and doesn’t just re-enact it but moves it forward, digging further into the characters and family dynamics.
Whether or not this version will give us an answer to what happened, who knows… but the winding path through this infamous case looks good on its latest makeover.
