After last fall’s runaway success of Serial, the race was on to see what company would be first to launch its own version of the true-crime podcast. It looks like the winner will be Investigation Discovery, which announced plans for its own true-crime podcast today at the TCA’s winter press tour.
Henry Schleiff, ID’s Group President, didn’t share too many details about the podcast onstage, but he gave me some scoop afterwards about the project, which he’s fast-tracking for this spring even though he hasn’t yet settled on a subject, or host.
As Schleiff told me, the podcast idea was completely prompted by Serial:
“I think we were all surprised by the amount of press and attention—and indeed some of the viewership, or ‘soundship’—that the podcast got,” explained Schleiff, who credits a lesson he learned from the late Don Hewitt, who created 60 Minutes. “He used to say about 60 Minutes, ‘If you can turn off the video and just listen to the voices, you’ve still got a great story.’ You put that learning and you put the experience of podcasts together and we said, great, we tell stories really well, why don’t we do our own version, and we’ll do a multi-arc podcast.”
Schleiff also shared some possible hosting ideas: could Susan Lucci be the new Sarah Koenig?