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This article contains spoilers for The Staircase documentary and therefore probably the HBO series as well.

Before we begin, let’s be clear. There are only two people who know the real truth behind the events that are depicted in The Staircase. One of them is dead. And the other is Michael Peterson.

So this article is not going to be able to answer the question of whether Michael Peterson killed his wife Kathleen, and nor indeed is the series. This is not an article about the true story behind Kathleen Peterson’s murder.

Instead HBO’s excellent new drama The Staircase tells the true story of The Staircase – the documentary made by French director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade and released initially in 2004, later updated with further episodes as developments in the case unfolded.

Jean-Xavier de Lestrade and his producer Denis Poncet appear in the dramatization, as do other key players...

The true-crime tale has lately dominated scripted TV, with miniseries-length dissections of infamous incidents coming thick on the ground. Many of these shows have played as flat reenactments that don’t earn the running time they demand, serials that seem to be more interested in checking items off a list to get us to an opinion about “what really happened” than in finding something transformative in a familiar story. So it comes as a surprise that HBO Max’s “The Staircase” does exactly what its title implies, taking the audience beyond the first level and reaching for a second, elevated story.

This show dramatizes the events covered in the French documentary series of the same title — made in 2004 by director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade and available on Netflix. Both projects are about the death of Durham, N.C., woman Kathleen Peterson, possibly at the hands of her husband, Michael. Here, the...

In the scripted version of “The Staircase,” Kathleen Peterson (Toni Collette) slips on a step, falls down, and dies. The blood pouring from the top of her head is soon spread over the walls as she struggles to sit up, creating a convincing scene to the one soon discovered, photographed, and endlessly analyzed by the police. Like her distraught husband Michael (Colin Firth) claims from the start, Kathleen’s death was an accident.

And yet, Kathleen Peterson is murdered. A heated argument turns physical. The hallway again transforms into its inevitable, nightmarish state. Michael is both angry and apologetic, but he’s unquestionably at fault. Like the district attorney and his team claim from the start, Kathleen’s death was a homicide.

With only five of the limited series’ eight episodes screened for critics, there very well may be a third or fourth reenactment of a murder that’s been debated for nearly two decades.

Oscar-winning French director to revisit infamous case of Tennessee novelist accused of murdering wife.

French director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade is set to make a third instalment of his popular real-life crime thriller, The Staircase, revolving around Tennessee novelist Michael Peterson who was accused of murdering his wife in 2001.

Lestrade has followed the case since Peterson’s original trial in 2003 on charges of killing his wife Katherine, who was found in a pool of blood at the bottom of a staircase with injuries to her head.

That trial – at which Peterson was found guilty — was at the heart of Lestrade’s hit, 2004, HBO-backed miniseries The Staircase.

It is regarded as a seminal true-crime series and Sarah Koenig, creator of the hit podcast Serial, has cited it as one of her inspirations for her own episodic, murder-mystery investigation.

A 2011 one-off feature documentary The Staircase – The Last Chance, followed a retrial of Peterson, after evidence...