TV Picks 07.03.11

SUNDAY, July 3, 9am-3pm

Wimbledon Men’s Final

NBC This tennis championship contest was first played in 1877 just off of Worple Road in London’s Wimbledon district before 200 spectators, who paid a shilling apiece. This year’s event will take place nearby — before 15,000 fans who will pay up to $146.22.

MONDAY, July 4, 10am and 8pm

Independence Day Films

TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES TCM celebrates the Fourth of July with, at 10am, the 1959 American Revolution drama John Paul Jones, which stars Robert Stack in the title role as the Continental Navy captain who uttered the immortal words, “I have not yet begun to fight!” (TV-G). At 8pm, in the 1942 patriotic musical Yankee Doodle Dandy, Catholic actor Jimmy Cagney plays the famed Catholic composer George M. Cohan. (TV-G)

SUNDAY, July 10, 3-6pm, live

U.S. Women’s Open

NBC The final round of the 66th U.S. Women’s Open Championship takes place at an elevation of 6,400 feet on the 7,047-yard, par 71 East Course at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs. Colo.

SUNDAY, July 10, 10:30pm

Sky Island

PBS This new half-hour documentary from John Grabowska pictures the beautiful landscapes of the volcanic, desert-surrounded Jemez Mountains in north-central New Mexico. A recent two-year siege of drought and heat killed most of the area’s pinyon pine trees, and pikas (rabbit-like mammals) and salamanders are endangered.

TUESDAY, July 12, 5pm, live

MLB All-Star Game

FOX SPORTS “You can observe a lot by watching,” New York Yankees manager Yogi Berra instructed his momentarily inattentive players in 1964. Much of America will be observing and watching as Major League Baseball’s 82nd All-Star Game unfolds at Chase Field in Phoenix, home of the Arizona Diamondbacks.

TUESDAY, July 12, 10pm

Enemies of the People

PBS In Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge (“Red Khmer”) put their abstract atheistic communist ideology into genocidal practice as they enslaved, tortured and executed 2 million people. In this 90-minute documentary from 2009, journalist Thet Sambath, who lost his parents and brother, interviews top Khmer Rouge officials about their evil motivations — and they dare to smile. Advisory: TV-14.

FRIDAY, July 15, 3am and 6:30pm

The Road Up to the Kolyma River

EWTN Untold millions of people died in the Soviet communists’ Gulag slave labor camps in the frigid Russian Far East and Siberia. In this 2004 documentary by Kirill Kanin, survivors recall the horrors, heroism and faith they encountered, and Father Michael Shields, pastor of the Church of the Nativity in Magadan, adds perspective.

Dan Engler writes from Santa Barbara, California.