JonBenét Ramsey miniseries finds pair of suspicious parents in Melissa McCarthy and Clive Owen

The only thing surprising about the JonBenét Ramsey prestige miniseries is that it’s taken this long to make one. On Thursday, Paramount+ announced its new series about the infamous murder with the A-list casting of Melissa McCarthy and Clive Owen starring as JonBenét’s parents Patsy and John Ramsey. Richard LaGravenese (Academy Award-nominated screenwriter of The Fisher King) will serve as the series’ showrunner, with Anne Sewitsky (Presumed Innocent) serving as executive producer and director of four of the eight episodes. 

According to a synopsis from Paramount+, the show (working title JonBenét Ramsey) “explores the tragic unsolved murder of six-year-old beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey. It follows the Ramsey family, before and after the tragedy as they go through the painful loss of a child while facing intense public scrutiny caused by a media frenzy that caused this case to captivate an entire nation. At the heart of the series, it is the story of Patsy and John Ramsey—exploring the unbreakable partnership of these two complex people—as husband and wife, as mother and father – who had committed themselves and their children to building the narrative of a perfect, privileged life only to have it destroyed one Christmas night in 1996.” 

Hollywood has always had a true crime obsession, but in the age of the Prestige Limited Series Emmys Bait Television Event, the genre is thriving more than ever. We’re so used to stories being immediately ripped from the headlines and dropped on screen that the nearly 30 years it has taken to create a fictionalized version of JonBenét’s murder, which has already been the subject of multiple documentaries, seems like quite a long time. But it’s far from the only well-known true crime case in development. Ellen Pompeo and Mark Duplass will star in Hulu’s Orphan, which centers on the life of Natalia Grace, and Amanda Knox is executive producing a series based on her own life for the same streamer.

Notable for the Ramsey series—which was first announced in March—is that the murder is unsolved to this day, and a lot of scrutiny has been placed on the family over the years. Her parents reported her missing and found a ransom note hours before her body was found in their basement; some theorists have suggested one of the parents wrote the ransom note to cover up for the fact that one of them, or their then nine-year-old son Burke, had killed JonBenét (accidentally or otherwise). It’ll be interesting to see how the Paramount+ series handles the many unanswered questions about this particular crime.