Season 13 of The Amazing Race premieres Sunday, and the Emmys were last Sunday. But in the middle of all of that madness -- just a couple days before the show's sixth Emmy win for best competitive reality programming -- The Amazing Race creator and executive producer Bertram van Munster took time to chat briefly with us about the show, Phil, and all those Emmys.

Oh, and we also talked about Television Without Pity, of course. When asked if he knows about the site, van Munster replied, "Of course I do. Please have mercy on me."

If you're a fan of non-superhero comic books and you're not particularly squeamish, you've probably read and enjoyed writer Garth Ennis and artist Steve Dillon's tour de force series, Preacher. Their tale of small-town preacher Jesse Custer, the love of his life Tulip and his vampire best friend Cassidy was less about Custer's super-ability to make anyone do what he says (the byproduct of being possessed by an angel/demon half-breed) and even less about his mission to track down an on-the-run God. It was more about the lengths two friends and two lovers will go to in order to protect each other... as well as about trying to come up with the nastiest visuals comicdom had ever seen, from the man who had sex with meat to the boy who had "a face like an arse." Sounds like it would have made a great HBO series, right? Apparently, wrong.

Hit the reboot button. That's what ABC is doing this fall, working harder to rejigger returning scripted shows than to introduce new ones. Thanks to the winter's coma-inducing writers strike, network suits with good reason fear that we barely remember last fall's truncated newbies, like Dirty Sexy Money, or even midseason arrivals like Eli Stone. Or that when we do, we're not so gung-ho to revisit whatever vague recollections linger in brain cells since lashed by the likes of Wipeout.

So during ABC's two days this week at the Television Critics Association's L.A. fall-preview press tour, the network presented only one new scripted series -- a New York-ization of the '70s cops in the witty British drama fave Life on Mars. Instead, ABC's promotional and creative efforts this strike-slapped season will shift away from launching fresh/untested titles and toward nurturing familiar/underachieving shows to reach their full potential.

So you were thinking that you were going to have to wait until September 22 to see the next season of Heroes and wash the taste of Season 2 out of your mouth? Well, NBC is rolling out some new Heroes shit this summer. That's right, it's a karate chop.