And Tassler said she'd learned a lesson — that all the noise made by a small group of highly vocal fans doesn't translate into decent ratings. She even cited what happened with "Jericho" in her decision to cancel "Moonlight" — another show with lousy ratings and a small group of highly vocal fans.

Let's pretend for just a minute that some network decides that it wants to revive "Jericho." At this point, that's impossible. The cast and crew are long gone, working on other projects. The chances of reassembling them is about as likely as Lucy and Desi coming back from the great beyond.

So buying ads to convince people to do something that's not possible is, well, not exactly a wise expenditure.

It's their money. The Jericho Rangers can do whatever they want with it.

But, c'mon, at some point let just a little bit of reality figure into your thinking, OK?

Shhhh! Don't tell anybody, but some TV critics mess with obsessed TV show fans.

I'm not going to name names. And I wasn't one of them. Really.

Last summer during the Television Critics Association press tour, a lot of us critics were being bombarded with e-mails from fans of the canceled vampire drama "Moonlight." Demonstrating the same self-delusional behavior as "Jericho" fans, the "Moonlight" crowd kept insisting that another network was about to pick up the CBS castoff.

Of course, there was absolutely no evidence they were correct.

Among their most-cherished fantasies was that DirecTV was going to save "Moonlight" the way it saved "Friday Night Lights." And the fans essentially called critics liars when they accurately reported that DirecTV's executive in charge of making such decisions had debunked the rumor.

Critics, of course, proved to be right. "Moonlight" was not resurrected.

And some of them — not me, I promise — used rather inflammatory and derogatory terms to describe "Moonlight" fans, just to provoke a reaction from them. And drive up the hits on their Web sites. Which, of course, they did.

I'm just letting you know. ...

E-mail: pierce@desnews.com