CABLE | What’s new at Lifetime (…and Oxygen)

• Lifetime’s Friday night block returns tomorrow with new original episodes.
  • Lisa Williams: Life Among the Dead kicks off its second season at 9p/8c.
  • America’s Psychic Challenge premieres at 10p/9c.
  • Vampire drama Blood Ties is also back for season two at 11p/10c.
  • Yahoo TV is streaming all three episodes in advance of their premieres. These premieres are also a free download at iTunes.
• All this rearranging has landed Lifetime’s repurposed runs of Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives in a back-to-back two-hour block on Saturdays at 11p/10c.
• From the Lifetime Original Movie Department, The Gathering is a two-night miniseries premiering Saturday, October 13 at 9p/8c. The leads are Peter Gallagher (The O.C.) and Jamie-Lynn Sigler (The Sopranos). It’ll probably be terrible, but these two have made potentially awful material work before (Gallagher in “Center Stage”, for example, and Sigler in “Call Me: The Rise and Fall of Heidi Fleiss”).

MEANWHILE, AT THE COMPETITION | Oxygen, one of the pretenders to the “women’s cable destination” throne, was acquired this week by corporate giant NBC Universal for $925M