Oxygen will mark 20 years of its reality crime series Snapped with a two-hour special in May.

The show’s anniversary special debuts May 12 on Oxygen and promises to include new updates to the show's “craziest” Snapped cases, according to the network. The series, which debuted on Oxygen in 2004 and has chronicled the lives of women who lost control and were charged with murder, is currently in its 33rd season, according to the network. Overall, Snapped will have aired 646 episodes by the end of the current season, Oxygen said. 

The series, one of the first shows launched in the now-burgeoning true crime genre, has spawned three spinoffs, including Snapped: Killer Couples, Snapped: Behind Bars, and Snapped: Notorious.

The current season of Snapped is on track to be the shows strongest-performing season ever, averaging 725,000 total viewers in multiplatform viewing, per Nielsen figures supplied by Oxygen.

This is a quick snapshot of TV by the numbers for the week of Nov. 9-15, revealing the most-watched shows and networks using glass-level data from Vizio’s Inscape, and the top shows and networks by TV ad impressions with insights via iSpot.tv. 

Most-Watched Shows and Networks 

Via Vizio’s Inscape, the TV data company with insights from a panel of more than 16 million active and opted-in smart TVs. Data is linear, live TV only and includes all episode types (new and reruns). Rankings are by percent share duration (i.e., time spent watching).

For the first time, college football overtook NFL games for watch-time last week, with 3.68% of minutes watched vs. 2.09%. The 2020 Masters Tournament was third with 1.70% share duration. Various morning and news programs rose up the ranking compared to the previous week. Snapped, a true-crime reality series on Oxygen, was one notable ranking newcomer.

Also Read: Meeting the Challenge of a Most Unusual Sports Year

Thanks in part to college football, GMA and the 54th Annual CMA Awards, ABC took first place for watch-time (7.79%). NBC remained in second place (7.32%), while CBS took third (6.29%), propelled by the 2020 Masters Tournament and NFL games. Lifetime continued its march up the ranking, up to No. 20 from No. 25 in the previous week.

Top Shows and Networks by TV Ad Impressions

Via iSpot.tv, the always-on TV ad measurement and attribution company. Rankings are by TV ad impressions, for new episodes only. 

The NFL is still the champ when it comes to TV ad impressions, but it’s seen slight declines in the past few weeks. For Nov. 9-15, games generated nearly 7.1 billion impressions, down from 7.3 billion the previous week; the week before that, games delivered 7.8 billion. College football took No. 2 with 2.8 billion impressions, followed by Good Morning America (754.3 million). The Voice jumped up the ranking, generating 630.5 million impressions, an increase from the previous week’s 402.1 million. The season 17 premiere of Grey’s Anatomy also made the top 25, coming in with 394.1 million — ahead of The Bachelorette (356.7 million).

Broadcast networks dominated the top of the ranking, led by ABC (6.5 billion impressions), over 1 billion of which came from college football games and 509.9 million from the 54th Annual CMA Awards. In general, football continues to be the biggest driver of impressions for broadcast networks, even amidst schedule changes and cancelled games due to COVID-19-related issues. On the non-sports side of things, Hallmark saw a 20% increase in impressions week-over-week, up to 450.8 million, as people started to tune in more to its ongoing Christmas-movie bonanza.

Unwitting victims kidnapped off the street and brutally murdered. Serial killers scattering body parts across miles of swampland. Desperate searches by law-enforcement officials in a race against time to find a missing person.

At first blush, these terrible incidents seem incomprehensible to the typical TV viewer. Yet millions tune in almost every night to one of several networks that depict such stories — part of the popular genre of true-crime programming.

Such networks as Investigation Discovery (ID) — which devotes its entire programming lineup to true-crime content — as well as Lifetime, Oxygen, TV One, HLN and A&E are betting that depictions and re-enactments of disturbing and mysterious tales of real-life murder and mayhem will continue to captivate viewers who can’t seem to look away from the tragedies explored in genre-based series, documentaries and specials.

The true-crime genre has particular appeal to women viewers, who generally favor mysteries with dramatic storylines but also see their greatest fears reflected in the TV genre’s harrowing tales of murder and violence, most often featuring stories of crimes against women.

Just last year, cable and broadcast networks aired five projects about the 1996 death of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey and three projects on the 1995 murder trial of O.J. Simpson. LMN, NBC and ABC this year aired shows about the life and crimes of cult leader and murderer Charles Manson.

And more projects are on the docket:

• Women-targeted lifestyle channel Oxygen will offer a reboot of the Dick Wolf-produced series Cold Justice as part of its late 2017 rebrand into a crime destination network targeting millennial women.

• NBC is gearing up for a new entry in the Law & Order franchise focused on the sensational 1993 murder trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez. Edie Falco (Nurse Jackie) will star in the eight-episode Law & Order: True Crime — The Menendez Murders.

• Lifetime will also delve into the Menendez brothers’ murder of their parents as part of an original movie, which will star Courtney Love as Lyle and Erik’s mother.

• A&E, which last month resurrected its iconic series Cold Case Files, will tackle the 1990s murders of rap stars Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur in separate episodes of its reimagined Biography franchise, which returns later this year after a five-year hiatus.

• ID will comb through the child-murder trial of Casey Anthony in April with limited series Casey Anthony: An American Murder.

• Discovery Channel and HLN will feature shows surrounding 1990s "Unabomber" suspect Theodore Kaczynski

TV executives cited several factors for true crime’s TV resurgence, including the current crowded TV environment, with more than 450 scripted series on offer, and a confusing political and news arena where real vs. alternative facts are the subject of debate. Viewers are fixated on both current real-life crimes and incidents from the recent past that remain unsolved or invoke more questions than answers.

WIDE-RANGING APPEAL
“There’s a certain kind of sensationalism that in some ways, as a genre, appeals to both educated and barely educated men and women equally,” said Steven Weinstock, co-president and co-CEO of production company Truly Original, which produces ID’s non-scripted series Vanity Fair Confidential. “There’s a certain kind of touchstone that true crime hits, because in a narrative form, it’s very effective in creating a puzzle that forces an engagement in the process by the viewer.”

Added A&E executive vice president and head of programming Elaine Frontain Bryant, “I think people love a good mystery, and because there is so much chaos in the world, I think people just love to settle down and watch with the satisfaction of knowing that problems can be solved.”

The genre isn’t exactly new to cable: Unscripted reality shows such as Oxygen’s Snapped and A&E’s Cold Case Files and The First 48, as well as newsmagazine shows such as NBC’s Dateline, have chronicled real-life murderers and unsolved mysteries for decades. Interest in the genre seems to have peaked in recent months, though, with the launch of high-profile series that have captured viewers’ imaginations.

Projects like HBO’s 2015 docuseries The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, which followed the Manhattan real-estate heir who was considered a person of interest in several murders; and Netflix’s gripping Making a Murderer, which shadowed the Wisconsin murder trial of Steven Avery, have breathed additional life into the genre.

Truly Original’s Weinstock said the sensational nature of the real-life crimes depicted in those shows appeals to the basic human desire to be safe, and to viewers’ sense of voyeurism with regard to violent incidents and actions that would otherwise invoke fear and emotional stress.

‘SOCIAL REALISM’
“Part of the appeal of true crime is a kind of social realism,” Weinstock said. “True crime can describe events that are risqué, deviant or even mundane that [viewers] wouldn’t otherwise have access to.”

Also, true-crime shows allow viewers to play the role of couch detective as they try to finger the perpetrators before the actual killer is revealed — or of judge and jury when they already know who did it.

Supercharging the genre were three recent programs on the 1995 O.J. Simpson “Trial of the Century”: ESPN’s five-part docuseries O.J.: Made in America, which last month won an Oscar for best documentary; FX’s limited scripted series The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, which won five Primetime Emmy Awards; and ID’s Is O.J. Innocent? The Missing Evidence, which explored new theories and never-before-seen evidence regarding the trial.

Series such as Is O.J. Innocent? introduced well-known crime stories to younger audiences who may not have known much about the trial’s details, and allowed those viewers to make up their own minds about the verdict, said Henry Schlieff, president of the Discovery Communications network group that includes ID.

“In the case of O.J., if you go with the murder trial verdict, the killer was never found, so we give them a chance to decide what happened for themselves based on the evidence presented,” Schleiff said.

True-crime shows haven’t reached the lofty ratings level of top scripted shows such as AMC’s The Walking Dead, or even popular reality shows like Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Atlanta or Discovery Channel’s Gold Rush, both of which average more than 2 million viewers per episode. But true-crime aficionados are a loyal, passionate audience representing a cross-section of viewers, network officials said.

Some genre-specific shows have slashed through the cornucopia of TV content to generate big ratings. Lifetime’s Nov. 5 original movie Who Killed JonBenet? drew 1.5 million viewers, among the network’s highestperforming movies of last year.

Overall, ID set a network primetime ratings record in February, averaging more than 1.1 million viewers, according to Nielsen. It finished February as the most watched network on a total-day basis (Nielsen live-plus-3) among women 25-54.

Thirteen of ID’s primetime shows averaged more than 1 million viewers in February on a Nielsen live-plus-3- day basis, including shows with such provocative titles as Homicide Hunter: Lt. Joe Kenda, Murder Chose Me and Evil Lives Here.

“We do a lot of research, and people anecdotally are saying that that they’ve had enough of scripted drama and love to see these true crime stories play out,” Schleiff said. “The true-crime genre has never been hotter, so we love our position.”

Oxygen also will look to slay female viewers when it rebrands. The network, which already features the longest-running series in the genre with the 14-yera-old Snapped, will build on its true-crime lineup when it revamps later this year with the relaunch of former TNT series Cold Justice.

Oxygen’s shift in focus will mean removing hits with broader appeal, such as Bad Girls Club, with hopes that true crime will draw younger and older women to the network. The crime stories entertain while offering viewers a cautionary tale, executive vice president of programming and development Rod Aissa said.

“We hear in focus groups all the time that a lot of this true crime is identifiable for women: Be careful where you go; be careful dating online; make sure people know where you are,” Aissa said. “It’s very tangible for our audience.”

Since it launched in 2016, Oxygen’s “Crime Time” weekend block of true-crime programming has posted a 22% increase in viewing by women 25-54 and a 42% increase in total viewers compared with 2015, according to Oxygen.

In October, the network expanded the block to include Fridays and Mondays.

HOLDING OUT FOR HEROES
Along with unsuspecting victims, true crime programming also depicts heroes in the detectives who do the dirty work to find killers or missing persons, A&E’s Frontain Bryant said — and that also resonates with viewers. That’s one of the reasons the network decided to bring back Cold Case Files after more than a decade’s hiatus.

The 10-episode series, which reopens criminal cases that have gone unsolved for years, debuted Feb. 27.

“I think this is also a time when people need to look for heroes — the people who will not let it go until they solve the case,” she said.

Despite the spree of new shows, ID’s Schleiff isn’t concerned about true-crime oversaturation.

“We love the fact that others are finally coming into our space,” Schleiff said. “It heightens the interest in the category.”

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