Edie Falco to star in Law & Order: True Crime — The Menendez Murders

Edie Falco is ready to make her case. The Nurse Jackie and Sopranos star has been cast as defense attorney Leslie Abramson on Law & Order: True Crime — The Menendez Murders, NBC announced Friday.

The eight-episode first installment of the anthology series will center on brothers Erik and Lyle Menendez, who were convicted in 1996 of murdering their parents and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

The brothers, who were 18 and 21 at the time of the murders, were first tried together but had separate juries, both of which deadlocked. They were found guilty in a retrial. Abramson represented the brothers through both trials and claimed they had suffered a lifetime of abuse from their parents.

Falco, the first cast member to be announced for The Menendez Murders, has history with Law & Order and executive producer Dick Wolf. As Wolf said in a statement, “Our working relationship started when she was among an elite group of actors who made multiple appearances as defense attorneys on Law & Order in the early ’90s. Edie was at the top of that list. She did a fabulous job on Law & Order and, as Leslie Abramson, will knock the role out of the park.”

Written by fellow Law & Order veteran Rene Balcer, The Menendez Murders comes amid a recent boom in true-crime storytelling, following the Serial podcast, Netflix’s Making a Murderer series, and the FX hit The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story. Lifetime has also given the green light to a TV movie about the Menendez brothers, with Courtney Love on board to play mother Kitty Menendez.