By Tim Cuprisin Media Columnist Published May 28, 2010 at 11:00 AM
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We're on the cusp of the summer's first three-day weekend.

While the best advice is to turn off TV and head outside, some folks mark Memorial Day by curling up on the couch in front of the TV. The cable channels long ago figured this out and are now always certain to schedule marathons to keep us tuned in.

Turner Classic Movies uses the Memorial Day weekend to program a series of war movies, some of them true classics, like 1946's "The Best Years of Our Lives," really a post-war movie. It airs at 7 p.m. Saturday.

Other highlights include "The Great Escape" at 9 tonight, and "Mister Roberts" at 7 p.m. Sunday.

Here's a sampling of some other cable marathons:

  • "America's Next Top Model," 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday, on Oxygen.
  • "Bridezillas," 1 p.m., Saturday, to 4 a.m., Sunday, on WE.
  • "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit," 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., Sunday, on USA.
  • "America, the Story of Us," noon to 10 p.m., Sunday on the History Channel."
  • "The Pacific," first five episodes from 1 to 6 p.m., Sunday, on HBO2. The final five episodes from 1 to 6 p.m., Monday.
  • "16 and Pregnant," from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday on MTV.
  • "Law & Order," from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday, on TNT.
  • "Grill It! with Bobby Flay from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., Monday, on Food Network.
  • "Hoarders," 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday, when a new episode airs on A&E.

More colorful history than we're used to: That "America: The Story of Us" marathon on History Channel offers a pretty conventional overview of  American history.

But it does have some rarely-aired color film dating back to the launch of the New Deal. Here's a sample:

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.