He shot back: “So by the time I get home, you’ll have the knife sharpened and the big plastic bag all ready to dump my body into?”

Ha. Thanks to Snapped, I’d never be dumb enough to use garbage bags!

Here’s why: As I learned later that night, those innocent-seeming, mass-produced garbage bags jammed under the sink are actually full of incriminating detail. Melanie McGuire, a nurse from New Jersey, was put away for life because of her garbage bags. She killed her husband, dismembered him, put the parts in—you got it!—garbage bags, and then into suitcases and threw them into the ocean. They washed up on the shore in Virginia, near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. When she went to trial for the murder of her husband, William, the prosecution called a forensics expert who explained that he could tell that the garbage bags containing William’s corpse were from the very same lot as garbage bags detectives found in the McGuire home.

It’s very possible Snapped is one of those shows that flies under your radar. For one, it’s on Oxygen (Is that different from WE? From Lifetime?), which is somewhere in the Middle America of the cable landscape that is so easy to fly over. Although it airs Sundays at 10:30 p.m., it’s a fair bet that many women are watching it during its regular 90 minutes of repeats (three episodes in a row!) between 8 and 9:30 in the morning—just when, across the country, men are heading off to work and kissing their stay-at-home wives goodbye.

One of the show’s fascinations is that many of the murdered husbands don’t fit the abusive, the-bastard-got-what-he-deserved mold. Instead, shopping often seems to be the culprit, so much so that the show’s tag line could almost be, “Shop till he drops.” A stock piece of video footage, showing fancy Madison Avenue-type shoppers with Louis Vuitton and Prada bags slung over their shoulders, makes a regular appearance, to ominous effect. The women’s spending problems sometimes lead to credit card debt, bank fraud and other financial jams that they hide from their husbands. And rather than come clean to their husbands and try to work the issue out with a good financial planner, the women decide for some reason that murdering them is the better, more sensible option. Some claim their partners would’ve beaten them or otherwise abused them if their financial irresponsibility had been revealed, and defend the killing as a sort of last-ditch self-defense maneuver. Others hope to get insurance money to pay their creditors. Or take Melanie McGuire and her telltale garbage bags: She killed her husband in order to avoid a messy divorce and custody battle over her two children. The fact that a murder trial would likely be a bit more inconvenient than a divorce or custody case doesn’t seem to have occurred to her.

Often enough, it’s not fancy clothes but bar tabs and modest home furnishings and a few nice things that get these women in trouble. Their stories are from small towns and suburbs across the Midwest and South and Southwest. The footage of their small depressed towns and strip malls can make a viewer sympathetic to a woman who longs for a new or different life.

If a show like The Wire makes you want to be a detective, catching the bad guys and boozing it up at shabby watering holes, Snapped captures the often slow and frustrating pace of crime-solving, as well as the darker corners of America where local officers are busting their friends and neighbors, not big, bad drug dealers and serial killers. Law and Order, CSI and all the other prime-time crime shows have taught us to think we know what to look for and expect when it comes to catching a killer. But in real life, the blood spatters and bullet trajectories aren’t always the clues that ultimately convict.

Snapped is not a flashy show; to tell its stories of women who kill, the show relies on long exterior shots of police stations and family homes, and many sit-down interviews with law enforcement officers, friends and family members of the victims and perpetrators. And the show absolutely luxuriates in 80’s-style, Unsolved Mysteries-bad-reenactment glory, with liberal use of shadow, slo-mo and, when the situation calls for it, fuzzy embraces between lingerie-clad women and muscled men. What often results is the jarring juxtaposition of a blurred, kitschy reenactment followed by an actual, stomach-turning crime photo of a blood-spattered, gunshot corpse, still wearing pajamas or K-Mart underwear.

The motives behind Snapped are difficult to tease out. Does the show, currently in its seventh season, instruct women in how to off their partners?

It’s shocking, really, how simple it actually is. For example, you don’t need a gun. A woman named Lynn Turner poisoned not one, but two of her partners with antifreeze, and nearly got away with it. (The symptoms induced by ethylene glycol mimic those of flu.) Another woman, Sandy Murphy, who was not ultimately convicted of murder, might have faked her husband’s drug overdose with some Xanax and heroin.

“Most of the women that we profiled, they are facing problems that women all over the country are facing—economic, marital, custody battles—and we are seeing how they are dealing with the problems,” said Deborah Dawkins, a supervising producer of Snapped whose company, Jupiter Entertainment, also produces the new Oxygen show Captured. “But for them, they are so into the moment of desperation, they make a choice that we don’t make.”

Asked whether the show is empowering for women in some way, Ms. Dawkins and her producing partner, Donna Dudek, demurred. But they admitted that the show can, in some instances, rally the sisters. A woman named Kimberly Cunningham, upon learning that her brother-in-law had raped her daughter, drove to his job and shot him so many times that she needed to reload the gun halfway through her spree. It was impossible not to feel for a mother protecting her daughter. Still, stories like that are the exception, rather than the rule, on Snapped.

Somehow, Snapped manages not to be tacky, even when the women who commit the crimes are. (The ladies from Las Vegas are the worst!) Sure, it’s an addictive true-crime series that sucks you in with sex, drugs, murder and all those easy hooks that can leave you feeling a little dirty afterward. But, as Ms. Dudek pointed out, the show satisfies a real need for women besides pure entertainment: a fundamental curiosity that women have about each other and what they keep under the sink.

ready-to-wear line in October 1998, it seemed like an apocalypse for a

generation of fashion designers. A plucky downtowner with an outsize

personality, and the son of a New York

garment wholesaler, Mr. Mizrahi, 39,  was part of a cadré of designers

attempting to translate lower Manhattan street

style for the Madison Avenue lady. He was a creature of 1990's marketing whose

name became a household word with the 1995 documentary, Unzipped . Then he lost his patron, and a month later his comrade,

Todd Oldham, announced that he, too, was closing up shop.

Mr. Mizrahi is still reeling from those bad times. He's

pursuing a year-old $30 million lawsuit against Chanel and its subsidiary,

American Fragrances Inc. (he charges breach of contract and wants the rights to

his name back), and he has publicly licked his wounds in an autobiographical

off-Broadway one-man show and cabaret act, LES

MIZrahi .

But for the last two years, Mr. Mizrahi-an invention of the

fashion world-has been doggedly trying to reinvent himself.

This fall, his talk show will debut on the Oxygen TV network. And, with

architect H. Thomas O'Hara, who has collaborated with Robert A.M. Stern, Mr.

Mizrahi is helping to design "superluxury" pieds-à-terres

on West 42nd Street, just

down the street from Bryant Park, where he used to romp on the runway.

"I don't know why, but this project just really appeals to

me, because I can do it and say to the world that I did it on my own," said Mr.

Mizrahi on Aug. 2. "My show on Oxygen is just another example of doing exactly

what I please. That's the only way I can live my life is to do exactly as I

please. And opportunities arise and I have to take them."

But Isaac Mizrahi, Act II, causes him a certain level of

anxiety nonetheless. "I always say, 'How does a woman get pregnant for the

second or third time?' Somehow God endowed her with this forgetful nature, so

she forgets how hard it is. In fact, I keep taking these projects on, and I am

able to just forget how horrible it is until the last second. And sometimes

they're beautiful children, or sometimes they're horrible drug-addict children

who assault their parents."

For his new baby, Mr. Mizrahi sees "a beautiful prewar

limestone-a little bit of the Plaza on 42nd Street

… a beautiful sort of limestone residence building on the Park

Avenue of the future. It'll have all those luxury proportions of

prewar, so I'm kind of enthralled with the whole thing."

Then he draws back a little: "That's what it looks like in

my head."

Actually, the  red-brick exterior of the 1927

building at 113 West 42nd Street,

between Sixth Avenue and

Broadway, will remain intact. Mr. Mizrahi is charged with making over the

inside into 26 small studio and one-bedroom apartments, two per floor, and just

for fun-and lots of money-a triplex penthouse. This includes designing the

architectural finishes: appliances, hardware, windows, floors and lighting. The

total budget on the renovation is about $8 million. The developer, Mitchel

Maidman, will be charging from $700,000 for a 900-square-foot studio to $8

million for the triplex-that is, once he settles a bitchy 30-year-old battle

with the Durst family over ownership of the building.

But the Durst situation

is Mr. Maidman's challenge. Mr. Mizrahi's challenge is more personal. "I'm not

approaching this different from the way I've always approached designing anything,"

said Mr. Mizrahi. "Whether it's a dress or a stage set, it's all the same

thing-it's very classic thinking and problem-solving …. It's like I've trained

myself in a certain way. I don't claim to be designing this building; I claim

to be solving the problem of the building.

"This building, for instance, is small. It's a piqued kind

of a situation, and everything I do I get slapped with more fire codes, so at

one point I decided all the walls will be glass in the lobby," he said. "It's a

playful scene; it's kind of like walking into a light box! And you'll see

through the walls."

Also in the lobby, he said, "I'm sort of struggling with the

idea of a terrazzo floor. I sort of can't do without that-it's so the luxurious way, and in the middle

of the century it was everywhere."

The upstairs is petite also. There, Mr. Mizrahi set out to

create "two little, tiny places [per floor] that should be extremely

luxurious." But here, he had a muse to work from: the pied-à-terre buyer, "businessmen coming

into town every couple of weeks."

There were also light issues. "I think the most luxurious

thing about the apartments is the modern way they're being laid out. It's all

in the math. In the end, it's all in the math." For instance, "there are three

front windows and four back windows and you're thinking, 'How can we get a

bedroom with light in it?' And that's all I think design is, because I'm not

Parish."

Mr. Mizrahi will refit those windows with single frames and

no moldings. "That's not design-that's just the kind I like best."

Good light makes a good-looking room, and so on, said Mr.

Mizrahi. "They have depression problems in Sweden.

They design all this beautiful furniture, and they sit

around in it depressed because there's no light …. I think like in the 1930's, people

looked so good because in a room people were the important thing, and they were

more important than the furniture. Look at [the restaurant] La Grenouille. The

best thing about that place is that everybody looks so beautiful in that

restaurant, because the lighting is considered.

"This is a residence. You'll want to look really cute before

you go to work and really good when you come home and look a mess from a long

day. If you want to call that design, then go ahead."

Because he will also get to furnish some of the apartments,

Mr. Mizrahi gets to shop, too. He's using a different palette for each

apartment-depending, of course, on the kind of light it gets. In any event, the

furniture will always be Knoll. Mr. Mizrahi has been smitten with the mid-century

modern staple since he inherited some pieces from his "crazy Uncle Sam."

His inheritance now furnishes Mr. Mizrahi's own "small,

one-bedroom" apartment in a Bing and Bing–designed building on West

12th Street. "I bought the apartment, and I was a

little worried because it wasn't enormous," he said. "It had southwest

exposures. I was very nervous." So he hired apartment architect Ross Anderson,

who also designed Mr. Mizrahi's studio, and learned a lot in the process. "You

have a small place, and all you have to do is make the bed and load the

dishwasher and it looks great," he said.

In the end, Mr. Mizrahi can't explain his style as an

interior designer. "The design personality that comes through is really just

the skewed way that I think," he said. "I tend to have a very lopsided vision.

People sometimes don't like what I do, but I'm not that scared of critics. I

like to be liked, but it's more important for me to do what I want than to be

favorably reviewed.

But he obviously enjoys trying on lots of new hats. "There

are people who do jobs for praise and money," Mr. Mizrahi said. "Check my bank

account, darling-I don't do these things for money."