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.