Warning: This article contains some light spoilers for the first four episodes of Binge's The Staircase.
If I had to describe The Staircase to someone completely unfamiliar with the original case, I would probably tell them it's the equivalent of a true crime turducken.
For those of you playing along at home, a turducken refers to a dish in which a deboned chicken is stuffed into a deboned duck, which is then stuffed into a deboned turkey.
In this analogy, HBO's new drama series The Staircase, which stars Colin Firth and Toni Collette as Michael and Kathleen Peterson, is the turkey. The original documentary, also named The Staircase, which was initially released in 2004, with a sequel released in 2013, and a followup commissioned by Netflix in 2018, is the duck. And the real-life incident, in which North Carolina business executive Kathleen Peterson was found dead at the bottom of a set of stairs in her sprawling suburban home on December 9, 2001, is the chicken.
Watch the trailer for Binge's The Staircase. Post continues below.
This three-layered stuffing means that many people were already heavily invested in the mysterious death of Kathleen Peterson, her husband Michael's 2003 conviction, and everything that came after, before they had even watched the first episode of the new series.
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