New on the tube: 'Moonlight,' 'Brothers & Sisters'

  Just one network TV show premieres tonight, but most of your weekend favorites will be returning.

  “Moonlight”

  8 p.m., KCTV-5

  “I sleep in a freezer,” the sexy vampire Mick St. John tells his imaginary talk-show interviewer in a dream. “Garlic is tasty on pizza. It repels my dates, Toss holy water on me, I get wet. Crucifixes, if you're into that kind of thing. Oh, and I definitely can't turn into a bat. That would be cool, though, wouldn't it?”

  OK, we get it -- when watching “Moonlight,” we're supposed to check our preconceptions about vampires at the door. Isn't that what we did when “Angel,” the last regularly schedule vampire series on TV, came on? Isn't that what we'll do when “Six Feet Under” creator Alan Ball's vampire series airs on HBO in the near future?

  CBS didn't check its preconceptions about television at the door when creating this Friday-night bridge between “Ghost Whisperer” and “Numbers.” Mick (played here by Alex O'Loughlin) is a private investigator. He winds up in crime labs, looking at elaborately killed bodies. That, and the grimly violent climax to tonight's episode, is designed to pull in the “Numbers” crowd, while his near-immortality and sex appeal seem meant to pull in the Jennifer Love Hewitt acolytes.

  It just might. For while it is formulaic and slow-paced, “Moonlight” is stylish entertainment with a charming star aimed a specific audience -- the folks who stay home Friday night and watch CBS.

  ***

  Given the events of two weekends back, you might be interested to know that the season premiere of “Brothers & Sisters,” airing 9 p.m. Sunday on KMBC-9, features Sally Field going on and on about the war.

  While picking up her Emmy for portraying Nora Walker, the show's feisty matriarch, Field declared that if mothers ruled the world, there would be no more bleepity-bleep wars. The sentiment wasn't provocative -- Julia Ward Howe said much the same in her proclamation of the first Mother's Day in 1870 -- but the profanity was. Field earned the dreaded silent treatment from a network censor and a day of hand-wringing on cable news and talk radio.

  Sunday's show revolves around Nora's increasing anxiety about her son Justin (Dave Annable), who has already served a tour of duty in Afghanistan and is now in Iraq. She learns to text-message to keep in touch with other war moms, and begins the episode by sending Justin an Internet videogram. But no communication is forthcoming from the battle lines, and as Justin's silence continues, the usual family quarrels over the war (Nora versus her daughter Kitty, played by Calista Flockhart) become more fractious than ever.

  And if you've been reading the Internet rumors this summer regarding Justin, all I will say is, stay tuned.