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I went through a similar ordeal with law enforcement and the assistant DA that wanted to win a promotion to DA. My son was accused of a crime that he did not do and they had zero evidence and and he had never had any brush with the legal system but they wanted a good case that would make headlines. I had always trusted the law enforcement system and believed you are innocent until proven guilty but it the opposite. You are guilty and we had to spend $247,000 on legal costs before he was found not guilty by a jury of 12. The state wasted so much money and we are still paying off those we borrowed money from and he was also on 3rd party for a whole year. It was over four years ago now but I still suffer from depression and anxiety from this horrible, unbelievable failure of our legal system. I will never trust it again nor will any of my family. I don't even care whether Michael Peterson is guilty or innocent. Just the lies and misconduct of the procsecution team was glaring and oh so familar. They , too, did not care if he was guilty or innocent: they just wanted to win. Instead, everybody lost. The hundreds of thousands of dollars the state spent could have been spent on public "pretenders" for those pitiful prisoners that came into court chained together and their only choice was a plea bargain, which always meant guilty

If you think "I'm not into true crime documentaries, I'll pass" please do yourself a favour - don't think of it as a "crime doc".

This case has been one of the biggest and most controversial cases in recent times and if you have no idea of who Michael Peterson is you will be gripped by all the episodes.

Having previously watched the released episodes before Netflix premiered the series, adding 3 more, I had already formed an opinion and thought that 3 episodes would not make a huge difference. I was wrong. If the twists, turns, anger, love and incredible, mind-bending insider views weren't already enough, every single episode added had an incredible emotional charge to them.

This is not your usual "true crime" documentary. Yes, we have seen how the genre has expanded to showing the BTS footage, how Making A Murderer caught the attention of the whole world but trying not no spoil it... I would say MAM leaves a lot unsaid or "to be presumed" by the viewer. While The Staircase focuses on Michael Peterson and can easily be argued as "biased", I don't see how this particular case would have been fairly presented without that "bias". Meaning, all that is revealed (until the very last minutes of the last episode) will make you understand why Michael Peterson had the opportunity to be presented the way he is in this documentary.

If Making a Murderer did come up with several issues and questions were raised, they were just that - opening lines for possibilities that never got solved or resolved (most of them are still open for dispute).

But The Staircase is filled with facts and presentations of evidence that will for sure make everyone rethink about the whole justice system.

If you are familiar with the Owl Theory and don't understand why this wasn't discussed I would guess that it was a good effort to keep the bias to a minimum - not attempting to offer a solution, the viewer is left with what I believe to be the main core information. The flaws of a system are exposed - the flaws that everyone knows about but no one seems keen on solving... It is very disturbing (even for someone who is a fan of the true crime genre) to hear and clearly understand from the words and actions of the players involved in a murder case what *exactly* can go wrong - and why.

This was a brilliant, gripping series I watched in only 2 days because the revelations never end. I was not expecting to know much more about the case I was already familiar with but I was wrong.

I hope this documentary finds its way out of the true crime genre because even though it starts from a murder charge, everything else comes down to empathy, emotions, social and family relationships and a whole lot about how we, as a society, can be easily swayed from our very core beliefs.

You will laugh, you will cry, you will yell at the screen. No matter how you *personally* welcome what the director presents you, the raw honesty and the human emotions will affect you - from everyone involved in this tragedy.

I would say this is probably the best true crime doc I've seen, easily. And from someone who watches trials and live streams of these cases, I had never learned so much about the humanity (or lack thereof) and emotions going on in these procedures.

Don't read spoilers, don't read about the case if you have the chance to avoid it. This goes way beyond what is presented in any website you might read about it.

There's much (apparent) simplicity on the way the images are presented but they do serve a higher purpose - for the viewer to be able to live every situation as if it was happening to them.

Congratulations on the marvellous completion of 13 episodes and I truly hope every documentary lover will watch this, not only true-crime genre fans...

If you want to watch a police documentary don't watch this one because the mystery is still here (even though there are certain theories going around on the internet, I'll let you look by yourself).

This documentary is about a broken justice system that doesn't allow the defendant the fair ability to defend themselves. The State is the prosecution so why would they handle themselves all the evidence? It needs an unbiased third party to handle such evidence. Politics come into play in all aspect of society and it's just sad that it also colors the justice system, which should be politic-free and unbiased, always.

After viewing the entire 13 episodes now available on Netflix, I'm horrified at the incompetence of the local agencies responsible for investigating, collecting evidence, and evaluating evidence. However you feel about the character or guilt of the accused Michael Peterson, we should all be concerned about how law enforcement, prosecutors and those involved in evaluating scientific evidence, clearly mishandled their positions of authority. By allowing us to witness the flaws in the judgement of the judicial system, I can only say that fairness was not present in this case and no that one can claim any winners. It's obvious that under the right circumstances, anyone could find themselves unable to get a fair trial. Truly riveting and well produced documentary.

I wont go over the whole story here as many other have already done so. Yes, this is a tragic story and has some interesting twists. Yes, I feel that justice was not well served for this whole investigation and trial. However, this 13 episode series could have easily been edited down to 6 or 7 episodes. There is SO much fluff. There are SO many scenes that drag on or rehash the same info. The characters are just not that interesting to hear them go on and on. They even have drawn out scenes of cars parking or driving away or people walking...nothing going on. No drama. No storytelling. No point. It makes a slow story feel a LOT slower.

I found this to be a very captivating documentary. I didn't find it to be too long like other reviewers mentioned but I will agree that it is somewhat biased. I've never seen a doc that goes into as much detail as this one did. If you enjoy watching lawyers argue and try to prove their points to a jury then you will definitely enjoy this.

A good story kinda ruined by Netflix. Drags on for what seems like an eternity & i lost interest. I just ended up asking a friend how it ended.

We FF'ed a lot between Eps 1-8, then hit Wikipedia to find out what happened with the rest of this story. This could have been told in 4-5 eps...and been much more compelling.

Paterson tries to ride the wave of sympathy for unjustly convicted persons. Sorry, dude - even with this extremely biased, one-sided perspective your crocodile tears and tales of victimization are not convincing. I mean - you independently enlisted the film company! That's insane bias! I wasn't going to finish watching the series because *insert eye roll*, but I felt I needed all of the information if I was going to voice an opinion. The amount of egocentricity is astounding, so I suppose the "documentary" has that going for it. It's like a car wreck you can't turn away from... well, maybe a fender bender? I love true crime - the evidence-based ones finding the criminals, the exonerating of innocent convicts, and anything in between. I also have a high standard for integrity (no matter which side), and Peterson's manipulative tactics fall severely short of that bar.

THE STAIRCASE is protracted and meticulous, yet a fascinating study of how a 'Dream Team' legal defense is organized and executed. In December of 2001 acclaimed author, Michael Peterson, was accused in the death of his wife, Kathleen. It was his contention that Kathleen slipped and fell on a staircase in their home after an evening of wine and relaxation, while the prosecution maintained that Mr. Peterson had bludgeoned his wife, and positioned the body to appear as an accident. Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, the writer/director, has culled this account from more than six-hundred hours of taped documentation. Every aspect of the case is dissected and examined in great detail, and the viewer watches as each piece is crafted into the best possible case for the defense. The film demonstrates how expert witnesses are selected and coached so that the presentation to the jury becomes a calculated performance. The facts of a case are seen as nothing more than elements in a construction to portray the defendant in the most positive light. Truth is of secondary importance, and it is clear that in the American justice system, only the wealthy can receive anything approaching fairness. If you are a fan of The Courtroom Procedural, THE STAIRCASE is well worth your attention. Superb soundtrack by Jocelyn Pook.

Reading all these reviews after I finished watching the show what I realized is that most people don't realize what the criminal justice system should be all about. It's not about deciding if Peterson is innocent or not. It is also not about what your common sense tells you about what happened. Any person who is charged with something is "not guilty" unless proven "guilty" beyond reasonable doubts. And in this particular case it was prosecutors burden to prove that. The only thing which is begging us to give attention in this series is the broken criminal justice system and the fact that the DA will go any length to put someone behind the bars. This guy had some money so he could fight against it whether he killed his wife or not. But think about this possibility: you're poor and your wife died by an accident and they think you murdered her. So they will do whatever is there to do to put you away for good. And you cannot do anything about it because you are poor. The justice system is biased and rigged against the poor. Whether we think OJ or Peterson killed their wives doesn't mean anything. The prosecutors have to prove beyond reasonable doubts that they are guilty without masterminding the evidence and/or bringing prejudicial matters as evidence. The judge was not wise enough to stop that in Petersons case which he should have stopped. It's not like we can execute some innocent people for the sake of executing a lot of guilty people. If you are not proven guilty then you are not guilty and that's the bottom line. Just because something goes along smoothly according to our common sense doesn't make them right. You have to produce evidence what matters. I agree what David said in one episode, "the absence of evidence is not same as evidence of absence". No one knows if he killed his wife except himself until you can prove otherwise by the evidence of presence. If the prosecutors went for the DNA in her clothing straight forward maybe they would have better case against him rather than fabricating with the evidence. True they could have brought some more perspectives from the prosecutors side. It would have been really interesting to see their reaction after the Deaver things came out. But overall it's an average crime documentary with not very high quality. I'll put a 8 star and encourage you to watch it if you have some time to spare.

Poor half-wit that I have become, addled by designer drugs, libations from the very top shelf and meaningless affairs with cold, angry women, I was expecting this documentary to be about Scott Peterson, the man who murdered his pregnant wife in 2002 and dumped her body into the San Francisco Bay.

Turns out it is instead about Michael Peterson, American author who claimed to have discovered his wife's body at the bottom of a staircase in a pool of blood in their home in Durham North Carolina in 2001. They're both named Peterson; a pardonable mistake, certainly, in light of the grave missteps on display.

Despite my clueless imbecility when it comes to mayhem in the news, I discovered The Staircase to be an utterly gripping, 2-disc documentary from Academy Award-winning French director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, and was so overcome with an obscene fascination that I was up practically half the night, watching the entire series in one sitting.

Mr. Peterson is a terrible actor from his obviously staged 911 call right through the trial. And another clueless family says,"My daddy couldn't have done it," in the face of indisputable evidence.

Why wasn't it ever put into question, the paternity of the adopted girls ? The one looks exactly like Peterson ! And all the talk about Kathleen " falling " in the stairway ... she certainly could have " fallen" after being beaten ..... it was a good presentation ... he's guilty as hell.

In 1980, a woman in Australia became the centre of a media storm when she claimed that her baby had been taken by a dingo. The Australian public, led by a vicious and frenzied media, agreed amongst themselves that she had killed the baby as part of some obscure religious cult - because the baby was wearing a black dress!

There was no evidence, other than a missing baby and an odd-seeming couple. But everyone felt that the mother was cold and didn't display the proper signs of grief.

So, based on nothing but assumptions and some very shoddy police work, she was sent to prison. After multiple unsuccessful appeals, in 1986 a crucial piece of evidence was discovered and the mother was released for a new trial. In 1988 she was fully exonerated. In 2012 a coroner finally ruled that the baby had been killed by a dingo. They made a film about it, starring Meryl Streep, but the baby was still dead and her parents had been cruelly tried by the media and imprisoned by an unjust and negligent judicial system.

Ring any bells?

The story of The Staircase is eerily similar. Based on little more than a localised predisposition to dislike and distrust anyone intellectual, bohemian, bisexual, or even mildly odd, the incompetent, corrupt, and immensely bigoted police department and prosecutors mounted a modern-day witch-hunt against a man who they felt must be guilty of murder, simply by virtue of being closeted and weird (as well as intellectual and bohemian, of course). The moronic, bigoted local media quickly jumped on the bandwagon, bringing with them a moronic and bigoted public.

The sheer weight of reasonable doubt should have instantly exonerated the poor man, but the justice system proved, as usual, to be anything but, and the judge proved to be very nearly as useless and incompetent as everyone else involved. (Although he later admitted that this case had likely been a vast miscarriage of justice).

The unprecedented access given to the documentary crew throughout the trial makes for an exceptionally in-depth viewer experience. In stark contrast with the standard available material from a murder trial, which is almost entirely provided by a biased and unreliable news media, in this case we get a rare opportunity to follow the story from the inside, with an exceptional close-up view of the accused murderer through every stage of mounting his defence.

Having followed his case this closely, I find him innocent of all charges. Unfortunately I am in the minority. Seeing the way he was treated by the so-called judicial system, and how many reviewers of the documentary are still convinced of his guilt - despite a staggering lack of evidence that should at the very least raise "reasonable doubt" - I find myself wondering if we are all still living in 1980's Australia!