Want to feel old? The first time I watched The Staircase, I did it by mail. I ordered the DVDs of the French documentary series, which first aired on television in 2004, through Netflix, back in 2008, when subscribing to the streaming service mostly meant scrounging around your house for misplaced red envelopes. Because I could only rent one disc at a time, I found myself aching for the series in the days between receiving the next installment; it was my first real experience with compulsive watching, even though getting through all eight episodes took me weeks.

This feels quaint now. The series—now a thirteen-episode saga, as director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade has continued adding new material over the years—hit Netflix on Friday and many people will already be done blazing through it by Monday morning. That’s the thing about watching true crime these days: It has specific rites and rituals. I have a friend who refers her coziest leggings as “murder pants,” because they have become her uniform for armchair tragedy tourism. You click play on the first episode and ten hours later, you emerge, bleary and covered in Dorito dust. But before you can shower off, you disappear for another long, groggy stretch into rabbit holes and fan theories. You go to corners of the Internet you’ve never visited before, nine pages deep into Google results. The entire ceremony, from start to finish, usually requires one weekend, one outfit, and two takeout deliveries. And The Staircase is, arguably, the reason we do any of it.

Before The Staircase aired, first on Canal+ in Europe and later on The Sundance Channel in the United States, the true crime offerings on television tended to be low-brow and sensational, with grainy graphics and tinny, synthesized music. Shows like Forensic Files and The New Detectives covered one case (or sometimes more) per episode, relying on stagey re-enactments and soporific interviews with local law enforcement to sketch out the rough outlines of a murder or a disappearance. These shows were not exactly known for nuance—the point was to guide the viewer through a crime scene puzzle and then clearly explain the solution, all in under half an hour.

When de Lestrade began filming The Staircase in 2001, he wanted to lean into gray areas, to capture the quiet moments of despair that follow a splashy murder, rather than just hitting the gory details. This approach meant that his documentary stretched, both in episode length and in the time he took to film it, mimicking the way that trials and prison sentences drag on forever in real life. For the series’ main musical theme, de Lestrade did not pick a jangly jazz or crunchy rock anthem (unlike The Jinx, Andrew Jarecki’s blockbuster HBO docuseries from 2015, which went with the rock band The Eels growling out the words “I need fresh blood” for its main credits). Instead, he commissioned the English composer and violist Jocelyn Pook to write a mournful classical score, which sounds elegiac from the first chords. In Pook’s score, the viola soars over a delicate harp melody; it sounds as if the instrument is crying.



I will confess that it took me far longer than I would like to admit to realize that the title of The Staircase is a pun. The series is, at its core, about a murder case, and that case involves the bloody death of a woman in a stairwell. I missed this cleverness, at first, because I was so focused on the blunt banality of the title: the staircase, in de Lestrade’s series, is both a quotidian household feature and a potential death trap. It is equally pedestrian and monstrous. This is why the death of 48-year-old Kathleen Peterson, who was found at the bottom of a staircase on December 9, 2001, in her tony mansion in Durham, North Carolina, shocked so many and made the national news. Here was a woman who had every privilege, yet was felled, at least according to initial reports, by something so simple as a missed step.