The year 2004 was the year when malfeasance discovered niche marketing. There was something for everybody on the rap sheet. Sports fans had Kobe Bryant. Music fans had Michael Jackson. Park Avenue had Martha Stewart. Boardrooms had Conrad Black. Hollywood had Michael Eisner, Michael Ovitz, and the shareholders of Disney facing off in Delaware over Ovitz’s $140 million payoff.

For cable TV, the Peterson trial was the clear winner. This year the case was beaten to death on “Larry King Live” no fewer than 33 times. The liberating lesson was the same one the networks learned a few seasons back with the reality show explosion: You don’t need a big name to have a big hit.

Take the ongoing Robert Blake case. As a B-list celebrity and the erstwhile star of “Baretta,” Blake may have looked a promising bet when he allegedly fired a vintage World War II pistol at his wife Bonny’s head in 2001, but he’s old and weird and doesn’t play in the demo. Plus you can’t win the Lifetime audience with a victim who was a lousy grifting mother with a long record of fleecing rich men and a thriving mail-order porn business. In death as in life, Bonny Lee Bakley Blake remains doomed to be a wannabe star. The same was true of the spicy-seeming murder of Wall Street man-about-town Ted Ammon. Location, location, location is usually the watchword of a society crime with legs, and this one happened on a swell estate in East Hampton, but Ammon’s murderer, Danny Pelosi, was a venal, unmysterious scumbag, reminiscent of ’90s knucklehead Joey Buttafuoco without the redeeming Long Island Lolita Amy Fisher as love interest. Even so, it’s kept local hacks busy.

Trash culture may have reached its apogee on that hectic New York day in mid-December when the Peterson and Pelosi verdicts collided head-on with the revelation of would-be Homeland Security tsar Bernard Kerik’s love nest.

The demand for sensation is so great that the system will now happily invent celebrities to fill any gaps. What matters is to be able to identify with the demographics. The Petersons didn’t have the kind of alienating baggage that weighs down the Blake entourage. Laci could be cast as the perfect white suburban mother-to-be. Scott could star as the perfect Everyman louse. Amber Frey, the mistress who did the right thing, was blessed with a porn star name and the Playboy profession of masseuse. It was a package dreamed up for the female rage audience of afternoon TV.

By the time The Process was finished, the sunny housewife from Modesto married to the cute fertilizer salesman with a roving eye was almost as big in victim terms as Nicole Brown Simpson in the O.J. case. All it took was the blonde factor and class.

That was the only major difference between the disappearance of Laci and the almost identical but largely unremarked October 2002 death of Hawaiian, working-class Raye Rapoza – a “mystery” that was solved when her husband Eddie went to trial for driving his seven months’ pregnant wife Raye and 4-year-old daughter off a Moss Beach cliff into the ocean. Bigger than a lack of suspense, though, the Rapoza case didn’t have a Caucasian femme fatale to root for. The Peterson case had two: Amber with the hair and Laci with the smile, the two all-American Marys of cable TV.

I predict a short run for the latest piece of Grand Guignol that’s currently screaming through the tabs. The case of the doggie-loving, fetus-snatching murderess Lisa Montgomery surfaced just in time for Christmas. There’s a lifestyle problem. Who can really relate to a Kansas-dwelling rat terrier enthusiast who decides that, rather than go through the hassle of adoption procedures, she will drive across the state line to Missouri and rip the baby out of the womb of 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a pregnant dog breeder she met in the Internet chat room frequented by the rat-terrier set? In murder-appeal it is to the Peterson case what Jerry Springer is to Oprah – a daytime freak show at its most alienatingly grotesque. Ms. Montgomery will probably plead guilty and vanish but at least it provided some distraction from listening to President Bush’s warm endorsement of Donald Rumsfeld’s record as Secretary of Defense.

Who will come back? The Michael Jackson circus coming in the first half of next year may still end in acquittal. At this point, he may be too bizarre even for prison. Mr. Bryant seems to have hurt his reputation more lastingly with his fans by dissing Shaquille O’Neal than by being accused of rape. Mr. Black will probably turn into Mad King Ludwig. Mr. Kerik will have to start a new career as head of security for a five-star hotel in Jeddah, if he doesn’t wind up in the Big House for his organized crime connections. Only Stewart is poised to be bigger than ever. Her trial had it all. The lifestyle, the name recognition, and the ever-present cliffhanger of whether we could get her to acknowledge hubris.

All that ’90s perfection in the kitchen was getting old anyway. In jail she’s been able to retool her market positioning on a captive focus group. As CNN’s legal correspondent Jeffrey Toobin told me,’ ‘Her trial had it all. She seems to have done more deals not talking business during prison visits at Alderson than most of her male counterparts do from the Four Seasons.’ ‘The microwave in her cell is already cooking up Act 3 from a dish full of crow. And she’ll be coming out in March, blonder than ever.