Colin Firth and Tony Colette on HBO Max’s “Staircase”: TV Review

If you think you’ve seen at least one limited-edition series every Sunday this spring that sounds a lot like a documentary, news or podcast, you’re not wrong.

And if you get a little tired of these shows, which often add nothing more than Emmy-hungry actors getting dressed, you’re not alone.

However, “telling the same story” and “really trusting the source material” are very different things, and no matter how much you loved these true-crime/true-fraud documents and podcasts, they are not. Stairs.

Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s eight-part series premiered in 2005 on the Sundance Channel in the United States. TV Series before was TV Series, hex before was hex. He didn’t really invent the genre, but rather codified the structure of shifting sympathies, beatings, and wild evidence discovery that followed over and over again. There was a decade when Stairs It was hard to find and reappeared on Netflix, with five additional episodes that lacked the originality and gravitational pull of the original but still made it widely available.

The documentary, not its story about the murder of Kathleen Peterson and the trial of her husband Michael, is the key to HBO Max’s eight episodes. Stairs. It’s a meta-examination of the true truth of constructing, capturing, and distorting the true crime genre, which here elevates creator Antonio Campos’ focus, often against the backdrop of a gruesome feature taken from his titles. Christina – From a star-studded artistic reactive, to something often provocative. I just say “often” because in the five episodes sent to critics, the two sides of the story don’t always work equally effectively, and there are times when each side feels a little overwhelmed by the other.

As an update: The Petersons were like Durham, a perfectly blended family in North Carolina. Michael (Colin Firth) was an author and, at times, political candidate who had the constant support of his wife Kathleen (Tony Colette), CEO of Nortel. Their photogenic offspring included sons Todd (Patrick Schwarzenegger) and Clayton (Dane Dehan) and daughters Margaret (Sophie Turner), Martha (Odessa Young) and Caitlin (Olivia Dejong).

The cover of domestic bliss was blown in 2001 when Michael called 911 and claimed to have found his wife’s body at the bottom of the stairs after she allegedly accidentally picked it up. Michael was quickly arrested for his murder. Was he a cold-blooded murderer or was he targeted by the police because of critical comments he made in his column in the local newspaper?

To find out the details, a French film crew (Vincent Verminion and Frank Face as fictionalized versions of Jean-Xavier and producer Dennis Ponce) came to town and had full, perhaps very complete, access to many of the film’s key figures. case. Especially Michael.

I know it’s probably too late to say, but it’s the best way to watch HBO Max. Stairs I probably saw the documentary a few years ago. That way, you’ll have enough understanding of the story to appreciate how the campus, the debut writer and director of every episode I’ve ever seen, and co-star Maggie Connie create mysteries but are still surprised when the mysteries and variations arise. . above.

There are layers of pleasant dramatic irony that come from knowing certain information that is suspended: the complications of Michael’s sexuality, each child’s past, details of his past and his vision. How Family members, several lawyers, the documentary crew and viewers are arrested.

Simultaneously combining three different timelines, the series simultaneously explores how a similar case can last more than 16 years and engages in an extension of its own narrative, repetition of tragedy and shift in perspective that drives each episode. More than an hour. Episodes are packed but never loaded, and while there’s fatigue that comes from the constant escalation of pain, there’s a constant creature behind the hapless porn.

It helps that there are a lot of questions that are more relevant than just “Did Miley do that?” Though I’ll never think about what Stairs Like original star Harrison Ford, Firth focuses on Michael’s sassy indifference. Even if you are sure that he is lying about almost everything, you may wonder for a long time why he is lying and whether he was a forced liar means he is a murderer. While Kathleen is subservient, Colette is in character enough to be more than just a dead wife and storyteller.

A lot of signature happens to characters that not even the documentary understood. Michael Stulberg, returning after a bad transfer or mixed performances your honor s dopsik, He’s an amazing computational equalizer, just like Michael Rudolph’s attorney. I wish the prosecutors in the case had tried harder: Cullen Moss has no game, as Jim Harden and Parker Pose are left with a character defined only by the thick southern accent he uses to laugh a lot.

The decision to think of a documentary group more as compositions than characters is not an issue when they are actively filming the first four episodes. But when the fifth episode focuses more on their post-production process and them as humans, you realize they have no personality and no voice.

As he watched the documentary, he was less interested in Michael and more interested in his children’s polarized loyalty. This is also the best part of the last few chapters in the series; The performances by Turner, Young and Dehan better reflect the damage that this already focused attention can do to an already broken family.

Knowledge of the documentary provides enough context to immediately see how the campus visually appreciates the aesthetic established by Lestrade and where it is flourishing. Working loosely around the wonderful recreation of Peterson House, the campus sometimes uses verité style and even grainy videos to make viewers feel like they’re waking up to family dinners and strategy meetings. But then there’s the cinematic art sequence – a reminder if you needed it once it was already a documentary and didn’t need it anymore. The second episode has a special team defense and re-inspection strategy sequence between Peterson’s house and the fundraiser a year earlier at home, with the camera dancing ballet between scenes that are sometimes linked into an intricately attached scene.

With three episodes to watch, I wonder how Campos and Connie handle the documentary, its impact on the final appeal and subsequent genre. A lot can be done through a character played by Juliette Binoche who, so far, hasn’t been paid enough to justify the role she plays, you know, in Juliette Binoche.

I also wonder how he would handle the TV series The Owl Theory, an assumption so bizarre that documentaries didn’t even know what to make of it. It says so much about the show that even after watching this story for 13 unwritten hours, I still have a lot to see here.

Making a show written in a script is already very difficult in a great work of art. I give you Paramount + Suggest As a recent unsuccessful example. Still, Stairs A good series is about a great documentary, but it has the potential to become a good house section.