If you want a sign of how unimportant TV is today, Fox is running four back-to-back episodes of "'Til Death" in prime time tonight on Channel 6.
There aren't many better reasons to keep the set on tonight -- unless, of course, if you got a new 700-inch flat-screen and a Blu-ray player from Santa. If so, you're excused.
You're also excused if you're using your TV as a faux fireplace, with a burning Yule log on DVD. Time Warner Cable digital subscribers can borrow somebody else's fire by going to Channel 400, or 1400 in HD.
Other than that, switch off the set. Feel free to turn on the radio if you're looking for something to fill the dead air. Most stations are offering Christmas music throughout the day.
An animated Christmas gift: I discovered "Peace on Earth" a couple years ago on Turner Classic Movies. The Oscar-nominated animated short features some cuddly cartoon animals celebrating Christmas. But it has a more serious side.
It was produced in 1939, the year World War II began in Europe, making its message even more urgent.
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.
