There’s a boom in true-crime narratives across all media — TV series, movies, podcasts, and books. It seems impossible that it can keep growing, but it does. The Staircase is a good example of the proliferation, because it’s an adaptation of a Peabody Award–winning French docuseries of the same name that was sensationally popular as a two-hour Primetime television event in 2004, and then again as an expanded thirteen-episode Netflix series in 2012–13, with additional follow-up episodes aired on Netflix in 2018. The story never runs out of steam, it seems — it just keeps coming back as the genre gains more mainstream popularity.

This new HBO Max adaptation is a dramatic narrative based on the docuseries. It’s about the mysterious death of a wealthy North Carolina businesswoman, Kathleen Peterson, who was found at the bottom of an excessively bloody staircase with more head lacerations and bodily cuts and bruises than were easy to account for if she merely tripped and fell down the stairs. Her husband, Michael Peterson, a novelist, was indicted for her murder, but tormenting questions undermine his eventual conviction.

The making of the French documentary is one of the plot strands in this thirteen-episode drama, which features an amazing rollout of incriminating facts about the secret life and many lies of Michael Peterson. As anyone familiar with the true-crime genre is aware, it’s absolutely necessary that there be an almost unbelievable number of secrets revealed and/or murders and other crimes committed, to the point that your mind reels contemplating them. It also helps if there’s corruption or incompetence or both at every level of the police investigation and the workings of the so-called justice system, as there is here. (There’s generally no problem finding that.)