Spring Rubber

After many years of straying towards more business casual clothing, both Chris Warren and Tevin Wooten are wearing full suits on this new show. All of the rest of the dayparts still remain business casual. Guess they want to give primetime a more "professional and serious" tone. As far as the content of the program itself, only about 4 minutes of the 15-minute long top-of-the-hour segment were spent talking current weather. Most of the first few minutes were spent looking at video of Saturday's tornadoes, then a brief current weather update for like 3 minutes, followed by like 7-8 minutes of pre-produced video and discussion about the March 1993 snowstorm in the southern US and the impacts that the storms had on people at the time, and then finally a 1-minute outlook on overall temperature and precip trends to expect for the upcoming winter. Compared to the hard-weather content of Weather Center Live, I'm not a fan so far.

I mentioned in the Fox Weather thread a few weeks ago how odd it was for Fox Weather to debut a show called "America's Weather Center" while TWC already has "Weather Center Live" airing at the exact same time. Looks like TWC was quick to give up their branding and go for something more intense-sounding. Kind of sad to see the Weather Center branding, which has been a name at TWC since 1998, go by the wayside. I also have to wonder if some of these changes might be motivated by their competition at Fox Weather. As we know, Fox Weather does not have live programming from 12pm-3pm ET, so I wonder if TWC thought it best to put their top-billed Weather Underground show in a timeslot that Fox Weather isn't live, meanwhile placing the more "hard weather" Storm Center show during the later afternoon/evening in a timeslot where Fox is also doing live hard-weather programming. Here is a wide shot video of the studio showing where the new couch is located:

I noticed that they repositioned the monitor in their secondary studio, Studio K, to cover up the empty space behind the anchor desk. I'm glad they made this change. The fact that there are two endless black holes behind the anchors looks really bad; you NEVER want to have huge empty-looking gaps on your set. The moving of the monitor to a position directly behind the anchors allows them to block the empty holes in part by the monitor and in part by the anchors' bodies. Launch week: Now:

Oh my goodness; what are they thinking?!? That's the type of score graphic you'd think to put up when going to break, not during live game action!

What type of severe weather happened, and did Fox Weather cover it the entire time of the simulcast, or did they still cover multiple things?

For today's automated 8pm ET hour, they switched to using the America's Weather Center graphical setup, so we got live nighttime outdoor camera shots for the first time, combined with the usual daytime assortment of weather maps.

Looks like they don't have a long-form program for the 8pm ET hour tonight. They're airing the automated maps from Night Light but with the music that's used during automated America's Weather Center. The program itself is unbranded without anything except the Fox Weather bug on the screen. Oh, and the sun is still realistically up on the west coast as it should be.

I really like the KABC opens best, while I prefer the KGO lowers.

Fox Weather states that due to the flooding event in South Carolina, they're doing an extra two hours of live coverage until 2pm ET under the Sky Dome branding. John Marshall and Kendall Smith are the hosts of these extra two hours.

Interesting...combo reporter and meteorologist hybrid role...trying to make the most of their personnel.

Woah, that comes as a shock...to have a host change only 8 days into the program. Did Danielle allude to continuing at Fox Weather in a different role, or are we kind of not sure right now?

I am surprised that they weren't able to get the graphics rolled out prior to November sweeps. Sounds like they're still planning to roll out the graphics prior to the new year for at least some stations...

Looks like the bios page on Fox Weather's site is incomplete. Marissa Torres is currently filling in for Danielle Gersh, but Marissa doesn't have a bio on the site. Found this when I Googled her name: https://www.mediamoves.com/2021/10/fox-weather-adds-marissa-torres-ahead-of-launch.html Wonder if they have any other on-air personalities that we don't know about...

See guys, we're in Times Square so much that we put a camera shot of it on our VIDEO WALL!

Ok, that makes a little more sense as far as splitting up time shifts somewhat more equally. I wonder if that pair will anchor any other shows later today. They're still doing automated weather maps/skyline views as of 12pm ET. I think they also eliminated the :15 and :45 live updates during these hours. I didn't see one at 12:15pm ET. EDIT: A live update aired at 12:45pm ET with Kendall Smith.

Nice that they put city personalization into these opens with the logos and players on various buildings. Pretty cool compared to some RSN opens of the past.

Oh, weird. I think I tuned in during the 12pm ET hour and saw FWW playing. Were they doing the thing there they were interspersing a couple hours of FWW during the nighttime hours? Because I also saw FWW at 3am ET, then Night Light again at 4am ET. Danielle Gersh is today's afternoon update meteorologist. Her update segment right now has been a bit longer - a bit closer to 2 minutes instead of 1 minute, which is nice. Obviously, she's one of their main weeknight meteorologists, so that does make me think that the people who appear on these weekend updates might still be doing their regular 5-day weekday shifts. Guess we'll find out this upcoming week.

So Night Light is still on the air at 1am ET on weekends, and to my surprise, they are still doing live weather updates at :15 and :45, tonight hosted by Kendall Smith. One thing I've observed tonight and earlier today with Stephen Morgan is that these weather updates are being controlled by the meteorologist with no involvement of a control room. The meteorologist has a touchscreen on their podium where they press buttons to go live, to put up lower thirds, to take the maps full screen, and to send the stream back into the automated programming. I guess it's similar to what local station meteorologists do when they go live with severe weather updates, just with slightly more advanced capabilities. That also explains why when they were going live Thursday afternoon with tornado warning updates, the lower thirds for "Fox Weather Alert" were not animated. I guess they were running on this more basic production platform that's being run by the on-camera meteorologist. Now, does it make sense to be doing these live updates overnight when there's not really anything going on? Probably not. The weather geek in me and fan of TWC's old 24/7 format still appreciates it, but I can't imagine that it makes sense to have an on-air personality there for 6 hours overnight just to go live for one minute every half half hour, then sit around until their next 1-minute segment in the next half hour. Seems like a scenario where you would either want the meteorologist to have longer live segments in order to do a fully-fleshed-out forecast, or simply ditch the overnight meteorologist all together unless severe weather merits having someone on standby. Especially when they're in a position where they have to enter into automation on weekday afternoons due to lack of staffing, it seems weird to be burning on-air staff on the overnights.

Interestingly, "Fox Weather Rewind: Aviation Disasters" was recorded in Fox News Studio J instead of inside the Fox Weather Studio W. I would wonder if perhaps the show may have been recorded prior to the completion of the Fox Weather studio.

So it looks like the weekend afternoon schedule is the automated loop from 12pm ET - 6pm ET. Stephen Morgan provided a 1-minute live segment at :15 and :45 throughout the entire 6-hour block. If he's going to be the regular one doing this, I assume he won't be appearing as the third host on the weekday morning show every weekday going forward. Depending on if he does both Saturday and Sunday or just one of the two days, then I think his weekday appearances will be reduced to 3 or 4 days a week. Looks like a rerun of Fox Weather Wild started at 6pm ET after that screen that Georgie posted. Weird that they have that graphic prepared. Wonder if they would consider taking the live stream down at certain parts on weekends rather than doing the automated loop and/or prerecorded programming? Or maybe it's an idea that they considered in the past but ultimately decided to have something airing at all times.

You mean the Houston Buccaneers are not your favorite sports team? I love how they went full screen forecast on a game that will be played indoors. Somebody should do some research on which games are played inside. I'm surprised that they were insistent on a 3-person team for weekend mornings to where they put Jane Minar in this role. I guess it makes sense that they won't need her to work overnights every night of the week when the weather is quiet. I'm actually curious what her weekday role will be now that we're entering a quiet weather pattern, and there's no need for overnight updates. The weekend morning role is actually good for her in order to get her some regular, prominent airtime. EDIT: Just like weekdays, they enter into an automated loop under the "America's Weather Center" branding at 12pm ET. Will be curious to see if they just stick with this until that special that's airing later tonight or if they actually have any live shows prior to that. At the end of the last hour, production didn't bother to update the script on the prompter, so the hosts still read the script that said, "Coming up on the next hour of Fox Weather Skydome..." and did the full teaser for the "next hour" even though there wasn't going to be a next hour. EDIT 2: Stephen Morgan is live providing a weather update at :15 past under the "Fox Weather Sky Dome" branding.

Interesting, so they definitely do want eyeballs tuning into their platform for special coverage regardless of the time of day. I hope they show a continued commitment to this sort of thing going forward.

Came here to post this as well. And the hosts talked about these games just casually like, "Oh yeah, that's an exciting matchup. Really looking forward to that one!" etc, etc. Kind of embarrassing to be served this old content by the production staff and then just start talking about it on the air without any idea that these were last week's games. I'm sure that this was a graphic that was used during rehearsals that they forgot to update. I might be a bit more understanding if it DIDN'T HAVE THE DATE at the top of the graphic that maybe it would be reasonable that a non-college football fan might not realize that this was outdated, but with the date right there on the graphic, it should have served as a major red flag to anyone on staff to notice this and fix the error. Reminds me of the launch day on Monday when they kept saying over and over that game 1 of the World Series was that night, when really, the game was scheduled for the following night on Tuesday. It took them several hours into the broadcast to realize that they had the date of the game wrong. Also, for the entire day, they kept showing the start time of the Seahawks game as 4:15pm PT, when the real start time was 5:15pm PT. Clearly there's much room for improvement in getting the dates and times of their sports games correct. But hey, at least it's casual Friday? Sounds like she'll be working a Saturday-Wednesday shift and that Ian Oliver and Brigit Mahoney will probably be covering America's Weather Center on Thursdays and Fridays in that case... Wonder if Fox Weather will emulate TWC and just do live shows in the mornings only on weekends.

Looks like both Amy Freeze and Craig Herrera are out today. The evening team of Ian Oliver and Brigit Mahoney are anchoring America's Weather Center along with Steve Bender, who covered the break-in live segments for the past three hours. Interesting personnel setup. Also, why the heck does the morning team anchor a 6-hour shift every day, while almost everyone else is scheduled for a 2, 3, or 4-hour hour on-air shift? Especially Brigit Mahoney, who only anchored two hours each day Monday-Wednesday. Oliver at least joined the Fox Weather Wild team for additional coverage afterward. Are they trying to conserve the hours of a couple meteorologists to provide some weekend update segments here and there?

Looks like we now know why the schedule was displayed as "America's Weather Center" starting at 3 PM ET. Looks like now that we're past the opening day and past the severe weather events of the past two days, the plan going forward is to not have live programming from 12pm ET-3 PM ET. At the start of this hour, they entered into an automated loop of live cam and occasional weather maps with 3-day forecasts for various cities being displayed on the bottom of the screen. I can only assume they will be back live at 3 PM ET, and I'm guessing that this is probably what they'll be airing all day on weekends as well. They are still breaking in live with updates on severe weather throughout the automated programming loop, though, just like in the overnights. Guessing they'll probably keep one meteorologist in standby for these scenarios on weekends as well? Automated live cams: Automated weather maps: Live break-in: