The Nancy Grace of Comedy Takes on Casey Anthony’s Murder Case

When comedian Jena Friedman dropped by The Last Laugh podcast last fall around the release of her genre-bending series True Crime Story: Indefensible, she stopped herself mid-conspiratorial sentence to say, “now I sound like a hipster Nancy Grace, which I’m fully comfortable being.”

So it only makes too much sense that in one of the first two episodes of the show’s second season, premiering tonight at 10 p.m. ET on SundanceTV and streaming on AMC+, she decided to examine the case that defined Grace’s unhinged cable news career more than any other.

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Nearly 15 years after 2-year-old Caylee Anthony was found dead in Florida and more than a decade after her mother, Casey Anthony, was acquitted in her murder trial, Friedman set out to uncover what role the media—and Grace’s show specifically—played in the public’s perception of the verdict.

Unfortunately, Friedman did not land an interview with Casey Anthony herself, but she did manage to sit down with several people who were directly involved in the case, including defense attorney J. Cheney Mason, who she confronts in the exclusive clip below.

“Why do so many people believe that Casey Anthony got away with murder?” Friedman asks Mason in their interview. When he disputes how many people really think that, she dryly replies, “Everyone but you.”

Later, Friedman asks the lawyer directly, “Did Casey tell you what happened?”

“Well, I won’t be telling you that,” he answers. He then adds, “I can tell you with certainty that Casey did not kill her child,” before going after Nancy Grace for suggesting otherwise and “thinking she was clever” by coining the nickname “Tot Mom” for Anthony.

“Tot Mom is not a clever moniker,” Friedman, a skilled comedian who previously served as a field producer on The Daily Show and earned an Oscar nomination for co-writing Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, argues in response. “I can think of so many others.”

When Mason responds by saying that means she is “smarter” and “certainly better-looking” than Grace, Friedman gives him a knowing look. “Thank you,” she says. “But I try not to pit women in the media against each other.”

For more, listen to Jena Friedman on The Last Laugh podcast.

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