The Simpsons Movie returns to the original scene of the family's crimes when it debuts on HBO Sunday, July 6 at 9 PM ET. And the new tube-spawned film The X-Files: I Want to Believe is being readied for July 25 release. From TV to the movies and back again, it's the sort of life cycle that used to find its exponents dropping dead at the box office.

Does anybody remember that ABC's '60s campfest Batman was made into a theatrical film? (Well, it didn't have Julie Newman playing Catwoman, so that explains things right there.) What about Munster, Go Home? (CBS' fright family heads to England.) In the '90s, we had Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which was supposed to explain things about David Lynch's largely impenetrable (if enjoyable) ABC series, but didn't.

Manly men doing manly things are big-time on the tube now. Discovery's Deadliest Catch. History's Ax Men. TruTV's Black Gold. So maybe the manliest genre of all -- westerns -- is primed for a comeback.

Why sweat to catch seafood, cut down trees or work an oil rig when you can swagger down the street wearing guns and hot-looking leather, heroically hunting outlaws and cleaning up towns embodying what we now know as The American Way?

Friday Night Lights fans couldn't ask for more. Just as the show's second-season DVD set hits shelves this week (at the bargain list price of $30), the ratings-challenged fave also gets saved from extinction: NBC, home of the first two seasons, strikes a deal with DirecTV to split the improbable third go-round starting this fall.

Of course, Passions fans couldn't have asked for more, either, when the same two entities found a way to keep their soap alive last year. Right after NBC dropped it last September, DirecTV picked up fresh episodes, and all was happy. For awhile. Then the satellite company also found continuing Passions unworkable, trimming it from four days a week to three, and finally announcing it, too, will give up the ghost (literally, in the case of this supernatural soap) in August.

Looks like fans are literally giving blood to save CBS' Friday 9 PM vampire romance-actioner Moonlight from cancellation. They've teamed with the American Red Cross to organize donation drives. Which certainly seems more useful than sending tons of peanuts trying to resurrect Jericho.

Funny thing, though -- Moonlight may not be so likely to have a stake driven through it. Friday night is now a sticky wicket for the broadcast networks, who see viewership plummeting the way it already has Saturdays. And CBS' freshman vampire fave is reliably if not spectacularly rated, watched by more households than such demographic hits as The Office. The show flows nicely, too, with lineup mates Ghost Whisperer and Numb3rs.