email bio May 22, 2006 The CBS Sunday Night Movie soon will be in the same category as rabbit ears, black-and-white tabletop TV sets and reruns of The Lone Ranger.

Beginning in September, the 8-10 p.m. Sunday series will vanish without a trace, which is somewhat appropriate since the network's hit Thursday night series, Without a Trace, will move to 9 p.m. Sunday.

Premiering in 1986, the CBS Sunday Night Movie once was a proud showcase for original made-for-TV films and a smattering of notable feature attractions.

The "made- for" events have been highlighted by numerous award-winning Hallmark Hall of Fame productions (remember the superb Sarah, Plain and Tall trilogy with ?) and action-dramas like recent films centering on Jesse Stone, Robert S. Parker's fictional New England police chief.

And during the past two seasons, audience figures bordered on disastrous as the films competed against ABC's Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy.

When it premiered, the CBS series began competing directly against movie schedules on ABC and NBC. For 12 seasons the three networks essentially aired the same product - occasional "blockbuster" feature films mixed in with the "made-for" product.

However, the growing popularity of cable channels, which began airing TV moves and feature films on a regular basis, cut into the networks' movie audiences.

ABC saw the handwriting on the wall in 1998 when it dumped Sunday movies for 2 0/20, the newsmagazine, and The Practice, a hot show at the time.

NBC got out of the Sunday night movie business three years later, inserting Law & Order: Criminal Intent and UC: Undercover, a forgettable drama about U.S. intelligence agents that lasted only four months.

Unless CBS has something waiting in the wings, its last Hallmark Hall of Fame movie (No. 227) was In From the Night, which aired April 23 and featured as a writer who attempted to help her 16-year-old nephew, a victim of an abusive past.

Not every CBS Sunday Night Movie could be labeled a classic. But the lack of regularly-scheduled Hallmark movies will be another example of television's run- and-gun, cut-and-slash mentality.

Last week I noted that a major fall audience battle was shaping up at 8 p.m. Thursday between CBS' CSI and NBC's new drama, Studio 60 on the Sunset Trip, created by and of The West Wing fame.

On May 22, 1988, NBC began airing I Know My Name is Steven, a two-part, fact-based movie about a youngster abducted by a sex offender and held captive for seven years. Part two was the top-rated TV movie of the 1988-89 season.

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