Colin Firth tries true crime on for size in TheStaircaseHBOMax.
Colin Firth doesn’t look like a man you’d take for a killer, and neither does his character Michael Peterson in, an upcoming miniseries based on a true story that unfolded in North Carolina in 2001. But it doesn’t take long into the trailer that HBO Max dropped on Tuesday to reveal that the crime novelist isn’t who he seems.
The deeper the authorities get into their investigation, the more Michael worries about “some things that will come to light.” In a flashback, we learn that Kathleen knew that there was a little more to her husband than he let on. “It’s always two things with Michael,” she tells a friend who asks if Michael is indeed his name. “Yeah, unless he’s pulling a long con,” she replies just jokingly enough.
As in the series, the real-life Michael gave a handful of documentarians up-close access to his family as the investigation wore on. In fact,is based on Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s 2004 docuseries of the same title. The series was so ahead of our current fixation with real-life mysteries, that it’s been dubbed the Godfather of the true crime genre. Of course, that means that you can scope out how things play out ahead of time.