Opinion | Colin Firth puts Mr. Darcy to rest playing Michael Peterson in true crime drama ‘The Staircase’

Mr. Darcy who?

Colin Firth all but vanquishes any lingering ideas of him as a prideful nobleman with his shrewd and murky turn in the exceptional new HBO Max series “The Staircase.”

A dead missus. A husband on trial. We’re not in Austen-land anymore.

Less a man than a jumble of incongruities — with the tics and hubris to match — Firth plays writer and failed politician Michael Peterson, whom true crime buffs know all too well from the rambling Netflix doc that already covered the sensational death of Kathleen Peterson in Durham, North Carolina, in December 2001.

The subject of many a podcast, as well as the French documentary that preceded it all (winner of a Peabody Award), the idea of a new serialization no doubt arrives with an asterisk: Why?

In fact, it is not redundant at all if you are familiar with the case. It only broadens and sharpens the case’s horizon by turning it all into deep character drama. About a true crime, yes, one boiling in a vat of ambiguity. But this tragicomic version of “The Staircase” is also a meditation on a very particular place and time (early 2000s, pre-social media, American suburbia!), as well as a very blended family (the dynamics of all the many stepsiblings are as fascinating as the mysterious death itself).

Anchored by a host of sterling performances — Toni Collette plays the dead woman as the series hurtles back and forth in time, plus we get Parker Posey, Michael Stuhlbarg, Juliette Binoche and Rosemarie DeWitt — the eight-part series excels by branching into a bit of meta-ness. The narrative is as much about the murder trial as it is about the French documentary-makers covering the Petersons, the documentarians almost standing in for the audience itself as fresh facts come forward, new lies are unmasked and our own projections are foisted onto the lives of the people being dissected.

Reasonable doubt. Sexual identity. A labyrinthine justice system. The so-called “owl theory.”

We get all that and more, but it is the fascination with the fascination that most distinguishes it. Particularly in what is, arguably, an oversaturated “true crime” economy.

Nodding at a whole cottage industry built around the public obsession with husbands accused of offing their affluent, almost always white, wives — the saga of Scott Peterson (no relation) comes to mind, as do the travails of O.J. Simpson and Robert Blake — “The Staircase” toys with the voyeurism that a piece in Buzzfeed tried to deconstruct a few years ago. “The suburban context becomes a visual trope in these stories,” as that piece put it, trading on our “emotional resonance with the idea of ‘home’ with the white suburban family inside and some unknown outside force threatening it. Look at how normal everything looks, they suggest, even as the story teases the potential horror of what might have transpired inside these homes, rendered spooky or gothic in the aftermath.”

Lapping up against the spectre of those so-called perfect lives seen through the prism of so-called perfect images (all the more ubiquitous today, for obvious reasons), the public interest usually doubles down when “supposedly devoted husbands were discovered to have ‘scandalous’ double lives, which led to a morality play that began with an unrelenting examination of their marriages. And any deviations from ‘normal’ monogamous heterosexuality — often a husband lacking in devotion or having affairs — inevitably become the cause for sensationalist mini-panics and media tut-tutting.”

One of the stranger details of this particular case? One we learn almost right off the bat and you can broadly file under the category of Luridly Absurdist? That, according to Michael, during the fateful evening of his wife’s demise, they went out to sit by the pool, after the couple had dinner and watched the movie “America’s Sweethearts.” The definition of a big movie star clunker starring Julia Roberts, John Cusack and Catherine Zeta-Jones, among others — one that I hadn’t actually thought about for years — it came out earlier in 2001 and is, as far as final films go, an unfortunate one. Poor Kathleen.

And, eeks: Michael. Watching “America’s Sweethearts” is one thing, having to admit it in open court is, well, mortifying. Its plot, as some may recall, involves Billy Crystal playing a studio publicist desperately trying to keep a big secret from reporters during a huge motion picture’s press junket: that the film’s married co-stars, played by Zeta-Jones and Cusack, are actually splitsville. And loath each other. Additionally, we are also supposed to buy Roberts as the mousy personal assistant to Zeta-Jones. Suspension meet disbelief.

A movie about a movie — long before we would get an HBO series about a murder trial and a documentary covering that trial, in which the movie about a movie becomes part of the defence case. Meta-squared. A series in which a marriage is not all it seems. Life imitating art or, in this case, a forgotten, 2000-era stinker.

America’s Sweethearts, Michael and Kathleen Peterson ain’t. But unlike the last movie they watched together, which the New York Times once called a “lukewarm Champagne, an expensive one judging by the label,” “The Staircase,” thankfully, never goes flat.

Shinan Govani is a Toronto-based freelance contributing columnist covering culture and society. Follow him on Twitter: @shinangovani

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