A stake through the heart for 'Moonlight'

Now we know -- even blood isn't enough to satisfy Les Moonves and his rapacious CBS henchpersons. For a couple of months now, fans of the vampire-detective drama Moonlight have been donating thousands of pints of their own blood in an effort to convince CBS to keep the show for another season. (They were sending to the Red Cross rather than directly to Moonves, which might have worked better.) On Tuesday, CBS swung the axe anyway, canceling Moonlight on the eve of the network's upfront ceremony in New York. A couple of sitcoms on the ratings bubble, How I Met Your Mother and The New Adventures Of Old Christine, were renewed, which makes you wonder what those fans did for CBS. Donate their eyeballs and kidneys?

And you thought he was tough on 'The O'Reilly Factor'

Here's an old outtake from Bill O'Reilly's Inside Edition days where he gets a wee bit impatient with the performance of his teleprompter. Of course, if my computer could talk, it might tell some similar stories about me when I'm trying to upload photos to this blog. They would be lies, of course. Bleepin' lies. Bleepin' thing bleeps. But let's get back to O'Reilly here.

ABC's fall lineup: only two new shows

The aftershocks of a Hollywood writers' strike that ended three months ago continued rippling through television Tuesday as ABC unveiled a fall schedule with only two new programs -- a game show and a remake of a British series. The only new drama on the ABC schedule is Life On Mars, an American version of a BBC series. It stars Jason O'Mara (The Agency) as a detective who wakes up after a car crash to find himself back in 1973 -- but still working as a cop. Here's the full Herald story.

NBC officially destroys the last shred of human dignity

NBC isn't doing an upfront presentation in New York -- the network unveiled its fall schedule last month -- but its executives apparently felt some remorse about wasting an opportunity to induce mass horror and revulsion among advertisers and TV writers. So it chose upfront week to announce a new program that will premiere right after its coverage of the Beijing Olympics: Are You A Mama's Boy?, a reality show in which smothering women will choose wives for their Oedipally crippled sons. This blog can be...oh, let's say glib, but unfortunately this item is entirely true. So is the fact that Are You A Mama's Boy? is being produced by Ryan Seacrest, which should be fair warning to American Idol viewers about what prolonged exposure to Paula Abdul does to the human brain.

New life for 'Reaper' and 'The Unit', and a new network for 'Scrubs'

Three more shows on the ratings bubble have been renewed. The CW has picked up its satanic comedy-drama Reaper for at least another 13 episodes. CBS is bringing back military drama The Unit. And medical sitcom Scrubs is switching networks in its eighth season --  the is moving from NBC to ABC.

Hello, 'Eli Stone'...and goodbye, 'October Road' and 'Women's Murder Club'

From New York, where ABC is preparing its Tuesday upfront presentation, comes word that prophet-or-madman Eli Stone has been renewed for another season. But chick-cop drama Women's Murder Club and the Peyton Place-ish October Road have bit the dust.

NOT 'Back To You'

It's upfront week in New York, where the broadcast networks are unveiling their new fall lineups to advertisers. Formal presentations don't begin until Tuesday, when The CW and ABC do their thing. (CBS follows on Wednesday and Fox Thursday; NBC, skipping the upfronts this year, presented its fall lineup a few weeks ago.) But word is starting to leak out about some of the cancellations and renewals. Good news for fans of ABC's Boston Legal, Fox's Til Death and The CW's The Game: They've all reportedly been picked up for another season. Bad news for fans of Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton in Fox's Back To You: It's gone.

Remembering Frank Sinatra, from here to eternity

Expect a media and marketing blitz this week as the 10th anniversary of Frank Sinatra's May 14, 1998 death approaches. There will be a new postage stamp, new DVDs and CDs, and a film festival on Turner Classic Movies. In Sunday's Herald, there's an interview I did with Nancy Sinatra about her dad, Vietnam, and yucky father-daughter romantic ballads.

Screen Gems: TV the week of May 11

Sex: The Revolution! (10 p.m. Monday, VH1) -- From the Kinsey Report to Bill Clinton's stupid cigar tricks, this four-part documentary tracks the upheaval in American sexual mores during the second half the 20th century and its impact on culture and politics.

Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives (10 p.m. Monday, Food Network) -- Believe it or not, there's more than $45 seared tuna on South Beach. Host Guy Fieri, who each week seeks out just plain food on this series, pays a visit to the 11th Street Diner, South Beach's most determinedly unglamorous eatery, and likes what he finds.

Secret Diary of a Call Girl (10:30 p.m. Monday, Showtime) -- First we had soccer-mom-as-dope-dealer (Weeds), then math-teacher-as-meth-maker (Breaking Bad). And now it's legal-secretary-as-high-priced-hooker, with British actress Billie Piper as the demure Hannah by day and depraved Belle by night in this new sitcom. If Secret Diary of a Call Girl draws viewers, expect a kindergarten-teacher-turned-dominatrix in time for the fall season.

Hey, remember how great 'Living With Fran' used to be? No? How about 'Just Legal'? No? How about....

Nostalgia takes some peculiar forms. In Germany, for instance, there's something called ostaglie, a conjunction of the German words for east and nostalgia. Its devotees get together to drink watered-down beer, flash their old East German ID cards, and reminisce about the glories of the Trabant, the smoking, lurching little dogsled of a vehicle that passed for a car in the communist half of Germany. It wouldn't surprise me to hear that they even sing weepy ballads about the grand old days when you could get shot trying to flee over the Berlin Wall.

Nostalgia for The WB isn't quite that bizarre, but it's close. Are fans of the little-watched and less-mourned network that lasted from 1995 to 2006 really going to huddle around computers to watch their favorite episodes of classic WB shows? For that matter, what is a classic WB show? Parent 'Hood? Sister, Sister? Kirk? Savannah? (Excuse me for a moment while I pop a Xanax; I'm feeling considerable anxiety over the fact that I can even remember this stuff.)

Well, the Warner Brothers Television Group apparently thinks so. It's just announced that The WB, which went out of business in 2006 when it was merged with the equally unlamented UPN, is being reconstituted as an Internet-only channel airing, new short-form webisode series as well as, yes, "classic" WB shows.

Tucked away in the fine print is the fact that The WB will also show series produced by Warner Brothers' studio, including Friends. I wonder how that news will be taken by TV stations (and even cable networks like TBS) that are paying millions of dollars for the rights to syndicated reruns of shows like Friends.