Skip to main content

The Staircase trailer revisits a twisty murder investigation

If you know the name Michael Peterson, t’s probably not because you’ve read one of his novels. Instead, Peterson’s claim to infamy is his sensational trial near the turn of the 21st century for the murder of his wife, Kathleen Peterson. Incredibly, Peterson allowed a French documentary crew to record him and his family in the aftermath of the murder charge. Now, HBO Max is dramatizing the story of Michael and Kathleen Peterson in a new miniseries called The Staircase.

In the first trailer for The Staircase, Michael discovers the body of his wife at the bottom of the staircase with head trauma. However, suspicion soon turns to Michael himself due to some sordid details in his personal life coming to light. Regardless, Michael is so convinced that he will be found innocent that he opens up his family to additional scrutiny from outsiders.

Related Videos
The Staircase | Official Teaser | HBO Max

Colin Firth and Toni Collette headline the miniseries as Michael and Kathleen Peterson, respectively. Rosemarie DeWitt also stars as Candace Hunt Zamperini, with Juliette Binoche as Sophie Brunet, Parker Posey as Freda Black, Cullen Moss as Jim Hardin, Sophie Turner as Margaret Ratliff, Odessa Young as Martha Ratliff, Patrick Schwarzenegger as Todd Peterson, Dane DeHaan as Clayton Peterson, Olivia DeJonge as Caitlin Atwater, Michael Stuhlbarg as David Rudolf, Tim Guinee as Bill Peterson, Joel McKinnon Miller as Larry Pollard, Vincent Vermignon as Jean-Xavier, and Frank Feys as Denis Poncet.

Antonio Campos and Maggie Cohn created and developed The Staircase for television. The first three episodes will premiere on HBO Max on May 5. The five remaining episodes will be released weekly.

Editors' Recommendations

Three Pines trailer finds Alfred Molina searching for answers in murder mystery
Alfred Molina sits down and ponders in a scene from Three Pines.

It's always the picturesque towns that hide the darkest secrets. In Three Pines, the new crime series from Prime Video, the titular town appears to be perfect on the outside. When multiple dead bodies turn up in the official trailer, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache soon uncovers the murders are part of a larger story.

Based on the New York Times bestselling series of novels by Louise Penny, the show stars Alfred Molina, who also serves as an executive producer, as Armand Gamache, an intelligent detective called to the Canadian town of Three Pines to solve a murder case. After his arrival, more dead bodies turn up, raising questions about the suspicious circumstances surrounding each murder. As he plunges deeper into the investigation, Gamache unearths a bigger conspiracy involving the Sûreté du Québec police force. Gamache learns about the police's failure to investigate the cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Gamache says that it's his job "to find out what" the truth.

Read more
The best TV crime dramas to stream now on HBO Max
True Detective promo art featuring Detectives Harty and Cohle.

The TV streaming market is as packed and competitive for subscribers' dollars as it's ever been, and while HBO Max's future is shaky given the drama surrounding the recent Warner Bros. Discovery merger, the platform is still home to some of the highest-quality serialized content.

The overall HBO brand has built a stellar reputation in the TV industry for top-tier original programming, but it's particularly well known (aside from Game of Thrones) for its various crime dramas. It makes sense considering how seamlessly that genre meshes with limited or long-form storytelling. And for that, HBO Max has one of the most studded collections of shows ranging from exciting Max originals like this year's Tokyo Vice to the premium cabler's True Detective.
Tokyo Vice

Read more
After Dahmer: best serial killer movies and TV shows to watch
Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal in bloody shirt

Americans seem to fear and love serial killers in equal measure. How else to explain us huddling, stricken, around a neverending deluge of movies, shows, novels, podcasts, true crime non-fiction, and even video games that constantly puts these (mostly) men and their bloody deeds front and center? Our latest national obsession is the Netflix miniseries, Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, which has already become one of its biggest hits. (Although given that so many people inexplicably equate Netflix with streaming -- or even television itself -- and given the streamer's persistent dearth of premium content, I wonder if anything semi-compelling and suitably buzzy would instantly become a huge hit for it.)

But where were we ... oh, right, serial killers! They've been everywhere in our popular culture for decades, the subject of acclaimed stories like Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, Dexter, and True Detective. Even as real-life serial killing has declined since the 1980s due to a safer overall society and more sophisticated policing techniques, we remain hungry for more, um, serialized content. While we couldn't hope to create an exhaustive list in this space, here are four relatively recent shows and one movie you can switch over to once you've devoured Dahmer.
Black Bird (2022)
Paul Walter Hauser and Taron Egerton in Black Bird Apple TV

Read more