Melissa McCarthy and Clive Owen have been tapped to star in Paramount+’s limited series currently titled JonBenet Ramsey.
The planned series, which has landed a series order at the streamer, hails from MTV Entertainment Studios, 101 Studios, and showrunner Richard LaGravenese. It will be written by LaGravense and series creators Harrison Query and Tommy Wallach, with Presumed Innocent’s Anne Sewitsky directing four episodes.
What is JonBenet Ramsey about?
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the eight-episode series will focus on the real-life case of a 6-year-old beauty pageant contestant JonBenet Ramsey, who was killed in her family home in December 1996. The murder case remains unsolved to this day.
McCarthy and Owen are set to play JonBenet’s parents, Patsy and John Ramsey, respectively. MTV Entertainment Studios and 101 Studios reportedly started developing the series earlier this year.
Per the show’s description, the series will follow the Ramseys “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.”
Paramount Global Co-CEO Chris McCarthy said that McCarthy and Owen “are an extraordinary duo to delve into this tragic story that has cast a long, haunting shadow over American culture for nearly three decades.”
The Paramount+ series isn’t the first time the harrowing murder of JonBenet was explored, having been previously covered in movies and shows like the documentary miniseries The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey, A&E’s The Killing of JonBenét: The Truth Uncovered, Lifetime’s Who Killed JonBenét?, and Netflix’s Casting JonBenét.
