YMMV / Investigation Discovery

• Narm: Deadly Women in particular can fall into this due to the overdramatic narration, and Candice DeLong's analysis often consists of similarly melodramatic statements or attempts at deadpan humor that often fall flat. The interviewees in general also tend to point out how awful the crime was, such as in the episode "No Good Reason" where a man being interviewed states "The execution of a police officer is the most brutal of all murders."
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Many believe that Deadly Women would likely be a better series if it only focused on one case per episode rather than three, as the time constraints of the latter format mean that there's insufficient time to examine the facts of the individual cases and the perpetrators' motives in full detail. This in turn not only has the effect that the end results frequently feel sensationalistic and exploitative — a problem not helped by the often narmy acting and voiceover — but also that the experts' testimonies, particularly those of Candice DeLong and Janis Amatuzio, appear wasted and underutilized.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: Occasionally it's possible to find a genuinely good or at least committed performance on an ID show despite the channel's reputation for Narm.
  • In the Deadly Women segment on Gertrude Baniszewski, while Gertrude's actress is hamming it up as usual, the actress portraying her victim Sylvia Likens does a surprisingly good job in the part considering that she'd most likely never appeared in film or television before and been given the role based solely on her physical resemblance to the real individual she was portraying. While she make a few errors common among younger performers, such as struggling with her accent due to the fact that she's an Australian playing an American and having difficulty standing still in scenes where she's supposed to be dead, those can probably be forgiven considering the aforementioned factors. The same can be said for the actress portraying Sylvia's sister Jenny.
  • The actor playing Scott Eizember in I Almost Got Away With It also turns in an impressive performance that is terrifying to watch. It helps that his actor had experience in other roles and stated that he always gives his all to a performance.
  • In the Fear Thy Neighbor episode "Tunnel of Hate", Annette Wozniak (best known for her role as Jill in Bite) successfully manages to portray the victim's increasing fear and apprehension without it coming across as overly melodramatic.

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