LOS ANGELES — “Do you know what today is?” asked Patty Jenkins on a rainy Tuesday in January. Chris Pine shook his head.

It was a morbid anniversary: Seventy-two years before, Elizabeth Short, an aspiring actress known later as the Black Dahlia, was brutally murdered and dismembered, possibly in the bowels of the mansion where they sat — the Sowden House, built by Lloyd Wright (a son of Frank’s). It was home briefly to George Hodel, a prominent gynecologist who was widely suspected of the murder.

Mr. Pine was familiar with the story. Fresh off their success with “Wonder Woman,” in which Mr. Pine starred under Ms. Jenkins’s direction, the two of them had filmed a TV project here in 2017 tied to the Black Dahlia murder of 1947.

“I got a little nauseous,” she said about visiting the house’s basement. “And dizzy.”

A dizzying setting, perhaps, but appropriate for the project she was filming, which debuts Monday: “I Am the Night,” a six-episode limited series on TNT starring Mr. Pine that is loosely based on the 2008 memoir “One Day She’ll Darken” by Mr. Hodel’s granddaughter, Fauna Hodel. A noir-soaked mystery set in 1965, the series is a return to TV for Ms. Jenkins and the realization of a passion project over a decade in the making.