All crime all the time for Investigation Discovery
Female viewers help cable channel rise as others watch audiences erode
It’s a grim lineup. Husbands killing wives, wives stabbing husbands, murderous lovers, along with stalkers, kidnappers and serial killers past and present.
Brenda Boyd of Austin, Texas, can’t get enough of it. She’s a self-proclaimed “ID addict,” referring to the hardcore fans of mystery and crime cable network Investigation Discovery.
“It’s impossible to shut off,” said the 38-year-old administrator for the Texas Department of Transportation, who runs an “I Love ID TV” Facebook page. “In one way or another you can relate to it: you had that crazy boyfriend at one time, or you had somebody who was stalking you or that weird family member.”
Boyd is not alone. Music superstars Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj and tennis champion Serena Williams have said they’re hooked on ID’s documentary-style recreations of true crime stories.
ID finished the fourth quarter of 2015 as the most-watched ad-supported cable network among U.S. women ages 25 to 54, according to Nielsen data. In prime time, the channel had an average of 897,000 viewers overall, up 10 per cent from 2014. It’s the only cable network launched in the last 10 years to land among 20 top-rated channels — finishing 18th in 2015 — and it may be the last.
ID’s rise comes at a time when the maturing cable TV business is in a downward trend. Many established cable channels are seeing their audiences erode as viewers spend more time watching video through online streaming services. Media stocks were pummelled last year as more households opted out of cable and satellite TV subscriptions.
ID parent Discovery Communications, which also owns Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet and the Oprah Winfrey Network, was among those hard hit. Discovery’s stock dropped about 20 per cent in 2015 and faces the same future challenges as the rest of the industry.
But ID’s popularity is helping to deliver a much-needed boost to Discovery because cable channels are likely to need passionate fans if they are going to survive in the shifting media landscape.
Henry Schleiff, group president of Investigation Discovery, American Heroes Channel and Destination America, said ID has thrived because its well-defined niche of true crime — popular on TV since Jack Webb first mined the LAPD files in the 1950s — gives viewers what they want on a consistent basis.
“This is the one network that has played this programming 24 hours (a day) seven days a week,” he said. “This is all we do.” Discovery Communications doesn’t break out the earnings for its individual channels. But Schleiff said revenue for ID doubled by 2012 when it shifted to full-time true crime and has more than doubled again since. The channel has grown internationally as well, reaching 163 markets around the world, including Canada. The channel taps into the public’s growing fascination with crime stories while defying the current trend toward complex serialized storytelling popularized in many critically acclaimed dramas.
HBO’s documentary The Jinx told the story of murder suspect Robert Durst over six episodes. The wildly popular first edition of the NPR audio podcast Serial meticulously recounted the story of a Maryland teenager convicted of murdering his girlfriend over 15 parts.
Netflix experienced a lot of bingewatching over the holiday season with Making a Murderer, a 10-hour documentary series about Steven Avery, the Wisconsin man wrongly convicted of sexual assault and now serving a life sentence for a murder he says he did not commit.
Even Discovery Channel is enter- ing the fray with its multi-part series Killing Fields, which follows an unsolved Louisiana murder case from 1997.
But ID chooses to keep it simple, with criminal investigations boiled down to their just-the-facts-ma’am essence and mixed with a generous helping of emotional recollections of the victims. Every case depicted has been adjudicated and resolution comes at the end of an hour show. When one investigation ends, another begins.
Schleiff said ID serves an audience that still wants “predictability” when they turn on a favourite channel, especially working women who are also raising families.
“Their leisure time is so limited that they think of this as a guilty pleasure,” he said. “The shows have the entertainment quality of a soap opera with some payoff on how to avoid a crime or an experience. And the shows can be watched with a significant other.”
In the current era when TV viewers can watch what they want when they want it, ID fans are a throwback. When they turn the channel on, they leave it on. ID viewers watch an average of 54 continuous minutes a day, the most of any broadcast or cable network in the women 25-to-54 age group, Nielsen says.
Updated editions of 48 Hours and crime-oriented episodes of other network newsmagazines are a staple of ID’s program lineup. It’s currently scoring strong ratings with Barbara Walters’ archive of interviews with sensational criminals such as the Menendez brothers and Mark David Chapman, John Lennon’s assassin.
The channel does its own original investigative shows such as Deadline: Crime, hosted by NBC News anchor Tamron Hall; On the Case With Paula Zahn; and Killer Instinct, in which former Dateline NBC correspondent and online predator catcher Chris Hansen profiles serials murderers.
Many of ID’s original series use actors doing scripted re-enactments of criminal cases and have attentiongrabbing titles ( Wives With Knives, Who the Bleep Did I Marry?, A Stranger in My Home, Your Worst Nightmare, Fear Thy Neighbor). One series, A Crime to Remember, dramatizes cases from the 1950s and ’60s and has the look of a homicidal Mad Men.
ID’s highest-rated show is Homicide Hunter: Lt. Joe Kenda, featuring the case files of a laconic retired Colorado Springs, Colo., detective who solved nearly 400 murders in his career, drawing 1.6 million viewers on average.
Most of the series have the participation of people personally connected to the victims.
“I’ve referred to it as a club that no one wants to be a member of,” said Hall, whose sister was murdered in a case that was never solved. “When we ask these people to come on Deadline: Crime to tell their story, I’ve had very few say no. It’s a part of their feeling of justice. It’s a part of validating that, ‘This person was a part of my life, was here and I want you to know what happened to them.’”