Cooking shows spend a lot of time preparing us for the biggest home-cooked meal of the year. But as you're digesting your turkey today, TV is already feeding you Christmas shows.
You have to look around a bit to find some special programming that actually focuses on this holiday. The headline, of course, is "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving," which airs at 7 tonight on Channel 12. It's not the best of the Peanuts animated specials. But you have to take what you can get.
If you're interested in a little background on why we eat all this turkey and stuffing, try the History Channel. The cable channel offers "Home for the Holidays: The History of Thanksgiving" at 6 p.m. It's preceded at 5 by Inside Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Check back for Friday's column, which looks at the official start of Christmas viewing, which I don't recognize until the day after Thanksgiving.
On TV: The Daily Beast offers a list of the top TV Thanksgiving moments.
- NBC's "Saturday Night Live" will have three new episodes in December. "Gossip Girl" Blake Lively will host Dec. 5. "Twilight" and "New Moon" star Taylor Lautner hosts Dec. 12. James Franco hosts. Dec. 19.
- Oprah Winfrey will interview the president for a Dec. 13 Christmas special on ABC.
- Fox won the November sweeps.
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
