Development execs Winona Meringolo and Jane Latman engineer purposely formulaic lineups that have spawned a community of self-described #IDAddicts. The cautious, savvy duo behind Wives With Knives have developed a very subtle understanding of what keeps women frightened-but not too frightened-hour after hour after hour. But if ID’s hallmark brand-the frothy, exploitative guilty pleasure-seems out of touch, it still has a lot to tell us. Go ahead and laugh, you up-market binge-watchers of Netflix and HBO.
INVESTIGATION DISCOVERY SHOWS TV
This may be a golden era of sophisticated, scripted TV blockbusters, but across the ID network, nearly every program follows an essential, inviolable pattern of recreations, sometimes comically ominous voice-overs (“But who would want to murder the well-to-do family?”), zigzaggy plots, and a tidy ending. More than Lifetime or Oprah.Īnd, somewhat amazingly, the channel’s honchos-senior VP of development Jane Latman and her deputy, Winona Meringolo-have succeeded by making ID utterly formulaic. That means women like it more than they like TLC or Food Network. Among women ages 25 to 54, it went from number 50 in ad-supported cable channels to, this past September, number one. Launched nearly eight years ago from the Silver Spring headquarters of the sprawling media empire Discovery Communications, Investigation Discovery quickly became one of the fastest-growing cable networks in the US. All day, all night, people-often women-get abducted, raped, murdered on the true-crime network.Īnd all across America, female viewers can’t get enough. On Do Not Disturb: Hotel Horrors, the act is done in fancy hotels. On Murder in Paradise, people whack each other on vacation. On Elder Skelter, old people kill each other. On Blood Relatives, Evil Kin, and Evil Twins, people kill their family members. On Wives With Knives, Scorned: Love Kills, and Fatal Vows, people kill their partners. Turn on the Investigation Discovery channel and there’s a good chance a woman is getting killed.
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