From the network that gave us the bone-chilling Nancy Grace, Court TV is set to unleash John Waters on an all too deserving public.

The second-string cable network, buoyed up by the notoriety the E! channel gained from instant reenactments of the Michael Jackson trial (which starred a professional Jackson impersonator who, we were told, had kept up with all the surgeries), Court TV is currently filming Til Death Do Us Part — a series that will feature scripted reenactments of real-life spousal murders, each introduced by Waters (left) as “The Groom Reaper,” a sort of creepier Rod Sterling.

Appearing always as a guest at the wedding that will start each show, Waters, himself a notoriously out-and-in-your-face gay man, will make wry remarks, we hope, about the sanctity of such unions which, alas, will always end with somebody getting shot, stabbed or bludgeoned. The first show to air will center on a woman who hacked her husband to death with a hatchet — and then, amazingly, plead self-defense.

Waters is, of course, well known to our readers as the cult director of such screamingly subversive comedies as Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Hairspray — all of which starred the late Divine, a morbidly obese drag queen in Fredericks-of-Hollywood flamenco dresses who had a knack for spewing out Waters’ nasty one-liners with biting brio.

Though Waters rarely appeared on screen, he made himself something of his own trademark, thanks to his purposely seedy pencil-thin mustache which he admits “no white man could grow; there’s always a little Maybelline thrown in.”

Now with Till Death Do Us Part set to air in early spring, Waters may become an instantly recognizable TV icon, much like the Cryptkeeper, whose general style the director seems eerily to emulate. “I’ve always been jealous of Vincent Price’s career,” quipped Waters in a prepared statement for Court TV. “Maybe now that he’s dead, I can hijack it.”

Perhaps, he can hijack the vile Nancy Grace as well. Certainly he has nearly as much experience. A self-described “jailhouse junkie,” Waters has written about his life-long hobby of attending trials, the more notorious the better. In fact it is notoriety, rather then celebrity, that attracts him. Waters has sat in on such outrage cases as the Manson murders, the attempted assassination of President Ford by Squeaky Fromme, and the Patty Hearst trial, later even befriending the kidnapped heiress who now often cameos in his films or appears on his arm at film galas.

Waters also taught a film class in prison and had the convicts videotape a script they cobbled together with him. “It was entitled Rotten Apples, ” he recalled in one interview. “The biggest biker in the class played April — the girl from the wrong side of the tracks who had to claw her way to the top [a role reminiscent of Divine in Female Trouble, above.] He was just so not the type and I had to call the guards and ask them if they could bring down bathrobes and some mops for wigs. You know, I actually had to write drag memos to the guards so they could bring it down. And the guards — they would just look at me and roll their eyes. They just couldn’t believe it.” The film became the property of the prison and remains unseen.

We can only hope that Waters will use his influence on the producers of Til Death Do Us Part to make sure the happy homicides are not all about upward mobility wives like Betty Broderick but will feature the sort of low-end breeders we all know and love from docu-shows like Cops, where the luded-out accused are forever getting wrestled to the ground and cuffed with either their shirts off or in horrifically advanced stages of pregnancy.

Now that would really have the John Waters touch!