After it was announced that Dick Wolf and NBC are developing true-crime series about the Menendez brothers, CBS is also hopping on the true-crime anthology series train with a new series of their own. According to The Hollywood Reporter, CBS is in the midst of developing an unscripted true-crime anthology series about the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, the six-year-old beauty pageant girl who was found murdered in her home.
The show, if it gets greenlit by CBS executives, would air later in 2016 as a way to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Ramsey’s murder.
The show has yet to be titled, nor is there an episode count, though there’s speculation it would be a 10 episode run, similar to Netflix’s Making a Murderer and FX’s recent true-crime hit American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson.
While there’s limited details have been released about the show, it will be produced by Tom Forman, who worked on 48 Hours and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and Critical Content.
Since the show is unscripted, the participants of the show will be the members of the Ramsey family, the police who originally worked on the case and new experts that will be brought in to look over the case.
If the project is greenlit, the subject of the anthology series would change each year, much like what People vs. O.J. Simpson is planning on doing for their potential second season.
The first season of the show will focus on solving the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, who was thought to have been kidnapped the day after Christmas in 1996. Instead, she was found murdered in the basement of her house eight hours after the police were called when the family found a ransom note. Throughout the murder investigation, her family has been suspected of killing Ramsey, before being partially cleared in 2003. Her parents were completed cleared in 2008.
Though the case has been high-profile since it first was brought to national attention in 1996, no one has been charged in her death.
Also coming up in the true-crime genre is ABC’s The Jury, which is set to star The Good Wife‘s Archie Panjabi, who played private investigator Kalinda Sharma before exiting the show at the end of its sixth season. For each season of the show, there will be a different case and a different jury that the show focuses on.
Regardless of when the show premieres, 2016 is shaping up to the be the year of the TV revival and the year of the true-crime anthology series.