By Tim Cuprisin Media Columnist Published Feb 03, 2011 at 11:00 AM

Channel 6 had the week planned out with one word in mind: Packers.

Then a little bit of weather intervened and threw plans out the window.

"We had to call an audible," says Chuck Steinmetz, the general manager of Milwaukee's Fox affiliate.

That change in plans started Monday morning when Steinmetz and news director Jim Lemon got the station's lead meteorologist, Vince Condella, for a first-hand forecast on what was coming.

Condella's assessment of the approaching storm led to a dramatic reshuffling of the station's news staffs. Crews were to be sent to Kenosha, Racine, and other locations, overnighting in hotels.

Arrangements were made for other staff to stay at a hotel near Channel 6's Brown Deer studios so that the newsroom would be fully staffed.

And very quickly, the very serious weather story displaced the Packers at the top of newscasts.

Now that the storm has passed through, the focus on Sunday's Super Bowl is back for the Fox affiliate that will carry the game.

"That'll start changing -- probably today," says Steinmetz. "I don't make those decisions." (The news director makes the call on the stories).

Channel 6's Super Bowl focus really kicks off Saturday night at 9, when the regular newscast is replaced with a one-hour special in advance of Sunday's game. Sunday coverage begins at 10 a.m. with a local pre-game special before Fox network coverage kicks in for a full day of Super Bowl-related programming.

Weather can be exciting: Weather Channel front-line correspondent Jim Cantore was based in Chicago during this week's blizzard and, along with the rest of us, he enjoyed the thunder snow that accompanied the storm.

His excitement was caught on camera:

On TV: If you've been dying to see "Beavis and Butt-Head" return to TV, MTV is making your dreams come true by bringing the animated pair back this summer.

  • NBC says the fifth and final season of "Friday Night Lights" will premiere on the network on April 15. The fifth season DVD box comes out 10 days earlier, and it's already aired on DirecTV.
  • Speaking of NBC, EW.com says the network is bringing back "The Event" on March 5 with a two-hour episode. Meanwhile, Deadline Hollywood says NBC is cutting back "The Cape" to 10 episodes, rather than the expected 13. That's a bad sign for the future of the show.
  • CBS has given an early renewal to "NCIS" for next fall after signing a deal with Mark Harmon, and after this week's episode hit a series high of nearly 23 million viewers, according to Nielsen numbers.
  • Troubled "Two and a Half Men" star Charlie Sheen has issued a thank you to his fans for supporting him through his various messes. His statement: "Like Errol Flynn, who had to put down his sword on occasion, I just want to say, ‘thank-you.’"
  • After a year's absence, Comedy Central's "Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" will again be available for free viewing on Hulu.com. It's part of a deal between Hulu and Viacom, which includes some for-pay programming.
  • Dana Carvey returns to host this weekend's "Saturday Night Live" with musical guest Linkin Park. Russell Brand hosts next week, with Chris Brown as the musical guest.

That other big TV story: While our attention has been focused on the weather and the Super Bowl, unrest continues to plague Egypt. It's an enormous and dramatic story that has been the focus of the cable news channels.

Things turned ugly after President Hosni Mubarak gave a TV speech saying he wouldn't run for reelection later this year. Then pro-Mubarak forces started moving against foreign reporters in Cairo on Thursday, including a number of American journalists.

On Thursday night, Anderson Cooper's live telecast from the Egyptian capital was done without normal lighting and production because of a threat that pro-Mubarak thugs were on the prowl in the area around where he was broadcasting.

Here's Cooper reporting (and tweeting) from earlier in the day on how he got caught up in the story he was covering:

Tim Cuprisin Media Columnist

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.