‘The Blacklist’ pointed me to this series.
In that show the James Spader character is talking with friends about watching TV and he says that ‘The Staircase’ is riveting. It’s not often you find a show mentioned in another TV show so, also on account of the fact that I liked ‘The Blacklist’, when I heard Raymond Reddington say this I took note. Next time I was searching for something to watch I did a search.
‘The Staircase’ was a long time in the making.
It initially started out as a French TV show and then when Netflix came on-board it migrated to their service. The French crew followed a novelist by the name of Michael Peterson at the time when his wife died mysteriously on a staircase in their house.
What started out as a fairly straight-forward proposition got strange and stranger at every turn as it was revealed that a family friend of the Petersons in Germany (where Michael had been living in the 80s) was killed in similar circumstances.
Nevertheless the prosecution played tricks with evidence, left out exculpatory evidence, and maliciously dragged Peterson’s bisexual predilections into the case.
‘The Staircase’ is a recount of a story of the failure of the American justice system.
Slow and meditative with a luscious soundtrack, a high point for me was when Peterson is driving back home from the final court appearance with the radio on, it sounds like Tchaikovsky playing, something light and percussive, but I really felt as though I could understand Peterson’s sense of sadness at that moment.
As Peterson’s attorney David Rudolf said in summation, the state forced the wastage of millions of dollars of treasure in order to find Peterson guilty. At the end the judge (who tried the original case as well as the second set of hearings) got on-camera and gave a sort of apology but it rang hollow. What kind of recompense could be made to Peterson who lost not only his wife but his savings and years and years of happiness. ‘The Staircase’ is another in a string of shows constituting a solemn indictment of the criminal justice system. It’s shows like this that bring the police into disrepute.
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