The Staircase producers explain how the popular docuseries impacted their story
At this point, Michael Peterson's story is fairly known. Thanks to The Staircase, a docuseries that chronicles the unbelievable story of the novelist convicted for murdering his wife in 2003, many viewers are already invested in the tale. But now, with HBO Max's scripted series, also titled The Staircase, executive producers (and co-showrunners) Antonio Campos and Maggie Cohn hope to deliver a different kind of true-crime story.
"I saw the docuseries in 2008 when I was sent it on DVD by a producer who was interested in adapting it into a feature," Antonio Campos tells EW. "He told me three things about it: One was that the director and the producer didn't agree about Michael Peterson and what happened that night. He told me that there was way more to the story than in the doc. And then he also told me that the editor of the documentary had fallen in love with Michael through the footage and that they had started a correspondence that developed into a relationship while he was in prison. And it just immediately became clear that there was this other story there to explore. And then over the years, the story just kept developing and there were more twists. And even with the documentary, even with everything else out there, it just felt like there was always just more to the story than what most people knew."
HBO Max Colin Firth and Toni Collette in 'The Staircase'
For Cohn, part of her fascination with the story was that it seemed to coincide with interest in the true-crime genre at large. "I think that there is some sort of relationship between how that case evolved over time and the genre itself as it evolved over time," Cohn says. "And it does speak to the nebulous nature of justice, of innocence and guilt and how we are using true crime as this way into figuring out those things for ourselves in our own lives."
As both the genre and this story evolved, so too did the docuseries, which released new episodes as recently as 2018. At that point, Campos had already started working on the scripted project. "I had written a pilot and I had kind of mapped out the construction of what the approach would be to the series," he says. "And I'm friends with [docuseries director] Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, so before the final three episodes of the Netflix series came out, we had lunch and he told me what was ahead. That then helped me figure out what the ending could be."
Not only did the ending change, but Campos admits that his opinion on the case has also evolved over the years. "The truth was that through the process of making the show and watching the scenes come together, my feelings changed. And by the end of the series, I have a very different feeling about what happened that night than I did when I started it," Campos says.
Cohn, on the other hand, didn't experience a similar change of opinion. But she hopes the story they're telling isn't about the end result. It isn't about innocence or guilt. "We wanted to explore the true-crime genre in a different way," Cohn says. "Most true crime is the search for innocence, guilt, right, wrong, a single truth. And this is a story that's exploring the idea that none of those things actually exist and the pursuit of them is maybe to all of our detriment, and that you'll never truly know what happened that night or kind of about anything."
The first three episodes of The Staircase are streaming now on HBO Max.
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