After five years of “The Late, Late Show” (11:37 p.m., CBS), Craig Kilborn has decided to move on to other ventures. Good for him. A half-decade stint on a talk show is a good, long run. I only wish more television and pop-culture figures would follow his example and know when to hang it up. I haven’t laughed at a David Letterman routine since Bush was president — the first Bush. And do we really need another CD by Madonna or Aerosmith? “That ’70s Show” has been grinding out horrible, unfunny episodes for at least three years now; that’s longer than the entire run of “The Honeymooners.” Hello, “West Wing” — ever hear of term limits?

Craig Kilborn could have signed a contract for more money than you or I will ever make and continue with a job that had become a comfortable routine. But he wanted to do something else. It’s a perfectly sane and healthy decision. And that’s what makes it so exceptional in today’s television business.

• Twenty-five years ago, during a televised American Film Institute salute to Alfred Hitchcock, someone asked the prolific director just what lessons viewers learned from his vast body of work. Not missing a beat, he dryly suggested, “Don’t commit murder,” or ghoulish words to that effect.

Hitchcock may have been joking, or maybe he wasn’t. In films from “Rebecca” to “Rope” to “Vertigo,” Hitchcock’s cinematic killers come to justice. But while he plumbed the psychic depths of the murderous mind, the popular series “Forensic Files” (9 p.m., Court TV) shows how criminals reveal themselves with the most mundane and microscopic evidence.

Tonight’s show, the series’ 200th episode, begins with the seemingly unsolved murder of an attractive 16-year-old who vanished on her way home from a Christmas shopping errand. When her body was discovered nine months later, police found no fingerprint or DNA evidence.

But slowly, authorities began to assemble a forensics trail: The victim’s body appeared to have been frozen in the intervening months, and only later re-deposited in the woods; her hands were tied with a plastic twist-tie unique to the postal service; and the plastic bag containing her body was sold in only two shops nearby. They also found traces of red carpeting, pollen from a privet hedge, and a leather dog collar of a particular brand.

Tonight’s other highlights

• A mother (Stockard Channing) can’t hide her disappointment when her teen daughter (Ellen Muth) comes out of the closet in the 2000 drama “The Truth about Jane” (6 p.m., Lifetime). Muth currently stars in the Showtime comedy “Dead Like Me.”
• The St. Louis Rams meet the Washington Redskins in NFL preseason football (7 p.m., Fox).
• A kilo of narcotics evidence goes AWOL on “JAG” (8 p.m., CBS).