In August of 1989, the city of Los Angeles was rocked by the gory double murder of Jose and Kitty Menendez, who were shot a combined 16 times while eating ice cream and watching a video on the family room sofa in their Beverly Hills home. Jose Menendez, a refugee from Castro’s Cuba, was a self-made multimillionaire businessman, a former RCA executive who had signed acts like the Eurythmics and Duran Duran, and, who, at the time of his death, was CEO of a lucrative video distribution company called Live Entertainment. After months of investigating possible mafia leads, the police arrested Lyle and Erik Menendez, the couple’s 21- and 18-year-old sons, on the basis of a taped confession that Erik had given to his therapist Dr. Jerome Oziel, which was in turn leaked to authorities by Oziel’s mistress, patient, and confidante, a woman named Judalon Smyth. The first set of trials in the case (one for each brother), which both resulted in hung juries, were, like the slightly later O.J. Simpson trial, televised on the recently launched network Court TV. A subsequent retrial, not televised, would ultimately result in guilty verdicts of first-degree murder and life-in-prison sentences for both brothers. But for several years in the early ’90s, the open question of whether the Menendez boys were ruthless, venal villains or sympathetic long-suffering victims—morally bankrupt rich kids who offed the parents threatening to disinherit them, or troubled casualties of parental abuse who saw parricide as their only way out—became a national preoccupation. The Menendez trials, and the gossipy chatter that surrounded them, made for must-see TV.
In October 1993, in one of a series of pieces for Vanity Fair about the Menendez case, the journalist Dominick Dunne wrote: “In Judge Stanley M. Weisberg’s courtroom in the Van Nuys Superior Court of the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, it is as if we are participating in a long mini-series, in which Leslie Abramson, the defense attorney for Erik, the younger of the two confessed killers, is defining for all future actresses how the role of the tough lady defense attorney should be played. Her scene-stealing performance, which at times infuriates Judge Weisberg, as it infuriates the prosecution, has all eyes focused on her every moment. And that’s exactly where she wants all eyes to be. There is never an instant when she is not performing. And she knows how to play to the Court TV camera as well as Barbra Streisand knows how to play to a movie camera.”
Perhaps, given Dunne’s observation, along with many others about the inherent theatricality of these trials and the bizarre central casting seediness of many of its players (“There is not a single sympathetic character in the Menendez story,” he wrote), the actors in a new dramatized miniseries about the ill-begotten episode might be forgiven for committing the cardinal sin of egregious overacting. Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders, a melodrama in eight parts, premieres tonight on NBC; ironically, Edie Falco, who portrays Abramson, a 4-foot-11 firebrand once referred to in a Los Angeles Times headline as “the best female criminal defense attorney around,” is the only notable cast member who doesn’t seem under the impression that she’s appearing in a daytime soap opera. Falco plays up her character’s contradictions—Abramson could be shockingly maternal toward her clients, and savagely vicious in their defense—to great effect, and with little support from the rest of her cast.
In his reporting, Dunne spilled plenty of ink on the subject of a toupee worn by Lyle Menendez, who was prematurely balding, allegedly to the dismay of his very image-focused father. Lyle’s hairpiece actually did quite a bit of heavy lifting in the trial: First, it helped Abramson illustrate the cruelty of Kitty, who supposedly, in a fit of ire, tore her older son’s rug from his scalp, revealing to Erik, for the first time ever, that Lyle was losing his hair. That moment of fraternal vulnerability is supposedly why Erik suddenly confessed to Lyle that their father had been sexually molesting him for years, a much-contested claim that became the basis for their defense strategy.
How did one brother not know that the other wore a toupee? Dunne was incredulous on this front, but admitted that he himself was fooled by “the masterpiece of wig-making that is affixed to the top of Lyle Menendez’s youthful head.” He wrote those words in the early 1990s. Is it possible that toupee technology has in fact backslid in the decades since? And if not, how do we account for the number of absolutely terrible wigs on display in this new NBC series?
We can perhaps forgive Falco’s corkscrew curls—Dunne, after all, described Abramson’s “curly blonde hair” that “bounces, Orphan Annie–style, when she walks and talks”—but what can we say about the strange brunette bob plunked atop Heather Graham’s noggin, in her turn as the histrionically deranged Judalon Smyth? Or the plastic Lego hair worn by Josh Charles as the comically wicked Dr. Oziel? Or, extra absurdly, the very uncanny ’80s mop that, along with an impossibly chiseled soap star jawline, distracts from Miles Gaston Villanueva’s attempt to embody Lyle Menendez?
Last year, Ryan Murphy’s The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story became a national phenomenon that rebooted popular interest in the O.J. Simpson trial. Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders tries, and largely fails, to rise to that level. The new series hits many of the same beats as Murphy’s: an impossibly ungainly title; hilariously dated costumes; surprise appearances from beloved, vintage actors (Josh Charles and Heather Graham, for example, each arguably broke out in 1989, he in Dead Poet’s Society, she in Drugstore Cowboy); a peek into how local politics plays out in the criminal justice system. Both shows also reintroduce us to complicated female lawyers; first Marcia Clark, now Abramson, who, prior to the Menendez trial, was a major legal star, and after was nearly discredited following a scandal involving a witness who altered his notes under her orders. (The State Bar of California ultimately dropped its misconduct case for lack of evidence.)
And both shows also trade on a certain level of camp, but The Menendez Murders, at least in the two episodes made available to press ahead of time, doesn’t seem to have many other arrows in its quiver. American Crime Story, as well as the O.J. Simpson debacle itself, contained broader lessons about race and class and gender in America, and the nuance of how those intersect and play out on the national stage—lessons that still feel profoundly relevant today. If the same can be said for the Menendez affair, the early episodes of this (over) dramatization have yet to convincingly make that case.