Oxygen continues to build on its true crime-themed lineup in April, including new series Kim Kardashian West: The Justice Project as well as specials Catching a Serial Killer: Sam Little and Snapped: Notorious Hollywood Ripper.

Rod Aissa, executive VP, original programming, Oxygen Media and E! Production, spoke with Multichannel News about true crime content’s popularity and the NBCUniversal-owned network’s evolving strategy. Here’s an edited excerpt of the conversation.

MCN: Did Oxygen’s move to true crime two years ago generate the ratings and brand development results that were anticipated?

Rod Aissa: It actually has. We’ve had another year of growth since our rebrand in our original true-crime programming block, and for us that is significant — that made us know that we are still relevant and we’re still on the path of evolution in our brand. We’re looking to diversify with more hours. Our struggle has always been, how do we get more hours to compete with the streaming devices, as well as the goliaths that some of our competitors in the cable landscape are. Now that we’re able to increase those hours, we have a stronger foothold in being a differentiator in the space.

MCN: Why is true crime so popular?

RA: There’s not a higher stake than a truecrime story. You can go on Jeopardy! and win a million dollars, but the stakes of life and death are the ultimate challenge. Getting into the psychology of why someone commits a crime and how justice gets served is fascinating to viewers. Whether we’re red, blue or independent, we all have to believe that our justice system is going to work for us. The genre itself speaks to amazing storytelling, and I think it also speaks to relatability and high stakes.

MCN: How will the industry evolve in 2020?

RA: You expect to see more movement on the streaming side. We’re excited about the Peacock launch because it provides more places to make content. As long as you can continue to make content in this game and get it out to the target audience, I think places like Oxygen will continue to be in really good shape. Within NBCU we’re the only crime network, so we’re additive to the sales offerings and we provide diversity in the portfolio, which is really important. We’re not trying to chase the same things that our sister networks are chasing.

MCN: How will the streaming wars evolve?

RA: It’ll be interesting to see with the launches of Quibi and Peacock — and with Disney+ seemingly doing well — who survives, how the various services survive and evolve within the marketplace.

MCN: You also oversee E! Productions. What are the expectations for that?

RA: We love the family doc space, and thanks to [Keeping Up With The Kardashians] and a few others we’ve had great success in it. We’re also looking at some old franchises from back in the day like E! True Hollywood Story and Talk Soup. There’s never been a better time for curation and funny commentary, so we certainly feel blessed to have all of these things to write and joke about.

We’ve also launched a news programming block in the morning from 7 to 11 a.m., which is drawing in a diverse audience. E! in its new evolution is building upon what’s worked in the past, while seeking to expand upon that with new content.

Oxygen Media, expanding into the crime programming genre, said it has greenlit eight new series and acquired Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.

The new projects come from producers including BuzzFeed, Dick Wolf, Ice-T, Soledad O’Brien and Nancy Grace.

In connection with the network’s new focus, it unveiled a new yellow and black logo. Since becoming a crime destination for women, total day ratings are up 48% from a year ago among total viewers.

“This new slate has a great mix of high stakes real-time crime investigation and innovative formats that allows viewers to stay engaged from beginning to end with immersive storytelling,” said Rod Aissa, executive vice president of original programming and development at Oxygen Media, part of Comcast’s NBCUniversal. “It’s a real differentiator in our programming, and we’re thrilled to be working with some of the sharpest talent and producers in the genre.”

Read more, including descriptions of Oxygen's new series, at broadcastingcable.com.

Scary Halloween-themed programming may be dead and buried until next year, but there’s still a lot of frightful content currently on cable channels featuring real-life blood, murder and mayhem — and women viewers can’t get enough of it.

True-crime reality series with such ominous titles as Fatal Vows, Homicide Hunter, Snapped and Fatal Attraction are killing with female viewers who can’t stop watching dramatic re-enactments of grisly murders committed by real-life women who make fictional horror movie characters like Freddy Kreuger and Jason Voorhees seem rational by comparison.

Witness an episode of Investigation Discovery’s docuseries Deadly Women, in which a professional female wrestler is sentenced to 759 years in prison for a series of grisly murders of mostly elderly women, committed out of a longstanding resentment felt for an unloving, abusive and mostly absent mother.

“Fiction can’t compare with human nature,” Henry Schleiff, Investigation Discovery, American Heroes Channel and Destination America group president, said. “We can’t make these stories up.”

GUILTY PLEASURE

True crime-based reality content is a guilty pleasure for women viewers, who are just as interested in the sins leading up to the crimes — such as jealousy, betrayal or infidelity — as the acts themselves or the repercussions that follow, network executives said.

“It is the ultimate drama with the ultimate stakes, and that is why it has broad appeal with women,” Rod Aissa, executive vice president of original programming and development for Oxygen Media, said. “The themes within an episode — whether it’s sin, jealousy, love or relationships — are themes that women like in their programming, and make it incredibly relatable to them.”

The true-crime reality genre is in effect an off shoot of the popular crime genre that has always drawn big audiences in mass entertainment, from TV shows to movies to books.

True crime “is a universal theme and genre ... if you look at what’s coming to a movie theater virtually every week, in addition to the tentpole action fi lm, it’s usually a movie in the crime genre,” Schleiff said. “If you look at this week’s New York Times book list, 10 of the top 15 [bestsellers] were in the mystery/suspense/crime category, so it’s not hard to see why it works on television.”

On the small screen, scripted crime procedurals such as NBC’s Law & Order franchise, CBS’s CSI and NCIS franchises and Criminal Minds, ABC’s Castle and HBO’s True Detective are popular with both men and women due to the fast-paced action, compelling storylines and attractive characters.

But it’s unscripted true crime dramas based on real crimes affecting real people that have increasing appeal specifically to women.

“Women have a unique intuition — they love the twists and turns, as well as the high stakes in emotionally compelling stories,” Schleiff said. “Most of all, they love the fact that these stories are real. This is not another scripted drama.”

That bodes well for Investigation Discovery, which produces more than 650 hours of true-crime programming each year, including such salacious titles as Wives With Knives, Who the (Bleep) Did I Marry? and Southern Fried Homicide. The network’s true-crime focus has helped make ID the most watched cable network among adult women (age 25-54) for September on a Nielsen live-plus-three-day basis, according to ID.

Catchy show titles and top-name talent — such stars as Roseanne Barr (Momsters), Susan Lucci (Deadly Affairs) and Wendy Williams (Death by Gossip) host shows on the networks, and Barbara Walters's American Scandal With Barbara Walters premieres tonight (Nov. 2)  — are the secret to ID’s success, according to Schleiff.

The network even has a social-media website dubbed IDaddicts.com, in which mostly female viewers talk about their “addiction” to ID’s programming. “It’s not unusual for viewers to watch three, four and five hours of ID at a time,” Schleiff said.

Another long-running show, Oxygen’s Snapped — which features women who have killed or maimed their spouses and lovers — has been successful because it showcases all the elements of a crime so that viewers can determine who is ultimately responsible, according to Aissa. Now in its 11th year, Snapped remains one of Oxygen’s most-watched programs and has spawned a pair of spinoff s: Snapped: Killer Couples and Snapped: She Made Me Do It.

“While the crimes more often than not are very dark, the nature or why they got to the point of where they have appeal to women viewers,” Aissa said. “It’s all rooted in themes of love and relationships — there’s usually a sense of a love gone wrong, of some kind of betrayal, or a longing for a better life. Watching those things go bad has appeal.”

Viewers also have a need to see justice meted out to the perpetrators — whether that comes from the police or those affected by the crime — D’Angela Proctor, head of original programming and production at TV One. The network’s Fatal Attraction, which profiles true life stories of women whose lives are ruined by the men they love, always ends with the bad guy going to jail, she said.

Not surprisingly, women make up more than 60% of Fatal Attraction’s audience, per TV One.

“What these true-crime dramas give you is a sense that there is justice in the world and that all can be right,” Proctor said.

Added Oxygen’s Aissa: “What women love is that there is an outcome and justice is served — someone is held responsible for someone’s murder, and that’s complete satiation for viewers. It’s empowering to watch justice get done.”

ID’s Schleiff also said the shows provide opportunities for women to learn what to do — and more importantly what not to do — when faced with situations depicted in the shows.

“[Viewers] feel that they can learn something, whether it’s through a show about stalking or whether we do a show about crime on the Internet,” he said. “Not everything we do is going to have a morality lesson, but there is a huge amount of learning that comes out of these shows.”

A&E’s The First 48 Hours tackles the desperate hunt for a killer, based on evidence found at the crime scene, over a two-day period. One of the longest-running true-crime series, the show — now in its 14th season — ranks as the top nonfiction crime/justice series on cable, averaging 1.4 million viewers.

“It’s that kind of play-along fun of solving something, versus just an action-oriented program that has a female appeal,” Elaine Frontain Bryant, executive vice president of programming for A&E, said. “Also, the authentic nature in which we tell the stories makes you feel like you are there along with it.”

Executives said there’s no end in sight to the genre, as female viewers in particular continue to gravitate to the strange but alluring mix of emotion, blood, death and justice. TV One later this year will debut a new series, Justice by Any Means, which spotlights people who take matters into their own hands to get justice for their loved ones, according to Proctor.

Oxygen’s Aissa said the network is looking at other opportunities to play in a genre in an effort to target younger female viewers, but would not reveal specifics.

PLENTY OF FODDER

With the amount of salacious headlines generated everyday around the world, ID’s Schlieff said there will always be an appetite for true-crime stories on television.

“Just pick up a consumer newspaper, and I guarantee you that there’s a front-page or second-page story in this genre,” he said. “We have a $3 billion marketing budget that comes from the incredible support we get from all of the newspapers and the magazines in the world who write about a crime, and to the extent they promote it, they’re also promoting our network and the genre.”

RATINGS CHARTS

Crime Pays

Reality shows based on true crime have been a ratings magnet for Investigation Discovery in its appeal to women aged 18-34. With 653 hours of original programming dedicated to the genre, the network is No. 3 in the demo this year on a total-day basis, behind USA Network and HGTV.

Network                       Women 18-34 Viewers (000)
USA Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
HGTV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
Investigation Discovery . . . . . . . . . 206
Adult Swim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
TNT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Nick at Nite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Nickelodeon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
TBS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
Food Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Disney Channel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158

SOURCE: Nielsen

Reality’s Most Wanted

A snapshot of how several true-crime reality series on basic cable stack up within the female 25-54 demo:

Program                          Network                       Viewers *
The First 48 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A&E. . . . . . . . . . . . .424
Nightwatch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A&E. . . . . . . . . . . . . 370
Homicide Hunter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ID . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
Fatal Vows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ID . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
Snapped . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oxygen . . . . . . . . . . . 161
Snapped: Killer Couples . . . . . . . . . . Oxygen . . . . . . . . . . . 141
For My Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . TV One . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Fatal Attraction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . TV One . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Snapped: She Made Me Do It . . . . . . . Oxygen . . . . . . . . . . . .71
* Women viewers 25-54 on a live-plus-same-day basis, in thousands

SOURCE: Nielsen

Oxygen Media has picked up five new reality series in advance of the network’s Oct. 7 rebrand, said Rod Aissa who was also elevated to the role of executive vice president of original programming and development.

The new series include The Investment Club, executively produced by Thom Beers and follows millennial entrepreneurs hoping to make it big; The Prancing Elite Project, produced by Crazy Legs Productions and chronicles an all-male competitive dance team in Mobile, Ala; The Wilkersons, from Magical Elves and follows the life of Pastor Rick Wilkerson and his family; and Finding My Father, produced by Asylum Entertainment which follows several men and women who are looking to piece together the truth about their past.  

The network will also expand its popular Preachers Of L.A. reality series with the 2015 launch of Preachers Of Detroit, said network officials.

These shows join the recently announced  greenlit series Nail’d It, My Crazy Love, Fix My Choir, Street Art Throwdown, Funny Girls, Living Different, It Takes A Sister, and After Happily Ever After. The shows are part of Oxygen’s rebrand launching on Oct. 7 and the unveiling the network’s “very real” tagline and new logo.

“Oxygen is committed to delivering more authentic originals geared to young, multicultural women,” said Aissa. “These vibrant series reinforce the network’s new programming direction as we continue to shape the future of Oxygen.”

In his new role, Aissa will continue to oversee the strategic development and production of Oxygen’s original programming and will help oversee the network’s rebrand, according to Oxygen. Aissa was behind the launch of several successful Oxygen series including Preachers of L.A and Sisterhood of Hip Hop.

“Rod has a remarkably intuitive touch for finding unique original content that is culturally relevant for our audience in this young, multicultural demo,” said Frances Berwick, President of Bravo and Oxygen Media.  “His passion and creativity will be instrumental as we continue to expand our programming slate for the new Oxygen.”