A French director spends over a decade documenting novelist Michael Peterson's murder trial after his wife Kathleen is found dead at the bottom of a staircase in their North Carolina home.
▶ Watch on Netflix 🔍 Find more docsThe Staircase is the series that basically invented modern long-form true crime television, and it still holds up because of the access: director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade's crew was inside the defense team's strategy sessions as they happened, not reconstructing them after the fact. Thirteen episodes in, you're still not sure what you believe, and the show never nudges you toward a tidy answer. It's also the rare true crime series with enough follow-through to matter — filmed across more than a decade as the case dragged through appeals and a final plea.
If The Staircase pulled you into true crime for the courtroom drama and the moral ambiguity, Night Stalker and Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel dig into the same unresolved, procedural territory.
| Region | Available | Platform |
|---|---|---|
| New Zealand | ✅ | Netflix |
| Australia | ✅ | Netflix |
| United States | ✅ | Netflix |
| United Kingdom | ✅ | Netflix |
| Canada | ✅ | Netflix |
| Ireland | ✅ | Netflix |
