The weather forecast calls for an outdoor weekend, but by the time Monday rolls around, you may want to plant yourself in front of the TV and celebrate Labor Day with mindless viewing.
Television, especially the cable channels, learned years ago to meet that need with rerun marathons and this year is no exception.
Leading my rerun marathon list is Monday's airing on TBS of 20 episodes of "The Office" starting at 9 a.m., with the very funny Larry Wilmore helping Michael through "Diversity Day." Episodes air until 7 p.m.
If you think the show has seen better days, these would be the better days you're talking about.
Here are 10 of the more noteworthy Monday marathons:
- "No Reservations" -- Travel Channel, from 8 a.m. until 2 a.m., with new episodes at at 8 and 9 p.m.
- "Hoarders" -- A&E, from 7 a.m.to 10 p.m., and then from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. Tuesday.
- "Two and a Half Men" -- FX, from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.
- "Bones" -- TNT from 11 a.m. until 7 p.m.
- "House Hunters International" -- HGTV, from 5:30 a.m. to 7 p.m.
- "Little People, Big World" -- TLC, from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m.
- "Dirty Jobs" -- Discovery, from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. Tuesday
- "Murder She Wrote" -- Hallmark Movie Channel from 7 a.m. to 3 a.m. Tuesday
- "I Love Lucy" -- Hallmark Channel from 7 a.m. until 3 a.m. Tuesday
- "The Secret Life of the American Teenager" -- ABC Family Channel, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Remembering "The March of Time": Turner Classic Movies marks the 75th anniversary of "The March of Time" with installments of the newsreel series from 7 to 10 p.m. Sunday.
"The March of Time" told the events of the day by mixing actual newsreel footage with recreations. Episodes were produced from 1935 through 1951. Here is the complete schedule of episodes airing Sunday night.
Channel 12 replaces Lyra O'Brien: Channel 12 has added Luke Sampe to its weather team starting Oct. 4. He replaces Lyra O'Brien, who's been freelancing for the ABC station since she left in July.
Sampe is currently chief meteorologist at WJFW-TV, the NBC station in Wausau/Rhinelander. The UW-Milwaukee grad is a native of Two Rivers, Minn.
Journal Broadcast Group's election plan: Journal Broadcast Group, which includes Channel 4 and WTMJ-AM (620) in Milwaukee, has outlined its plans for covering the upcoming election season, including a minimum of five minutes of election news coverage daily, Monday through Friday, in the 30 days before the general election.
That coverage will air on afternoon and late evening newscasts on Channel 4 and "high listener" periods on WTMJ.
The stations will run public service announcements urging people to vote and debates will be aired "where appropriate."
It was a technical problem: Viewers of Wednesday night's Brewers-Reds game on WMLW-TV (Channel 41 over the air, Channel 7 and 982 on Time Warner, and other locations on other TV services) reported problems with the picture.
General manager Jim Hall investigated and traced the problem to a piece of equipment the encodes the digital signal off the satellite feed. A setting had changed, producing a darker than normal picture.
"It was remedied earlier today," he told me late Thursday afternoon.
A Labor Day TV tradition: "The 45th Annual Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon" kicks off at 7 p.m. on WMLW, with sister channel 58 picking it up from 10 p.m. Sunday until 7 p.m. Monday.
Among the performers on the telethon will be 33 dancers from the Trinity Academy of Irish Dance, scheduled to perform sometime between 8 and 8:40 a.m. Among those dancers, 19 are from Wisconsin.
As long as we're talking about the telethon, here's the classic reunion of Lewis and his old partner, Dean Martin, on the 1976 telethon, thanks to Frank Sinatra.
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.