Years ago, Al Roker was on a lakeside walk with his two youngest children when the family noticed a rainbow. His excited preschool son pleaded with him to capture it as a Mother’s Day gift for their mom. Although Roker had to explain that this colorful surprise couldn’t be plucked from the sky, the incident helped seed an idea.
It reminded Roker, the longtime weather anchor for the NBC morning show “Today,” of what he had observed throughout his career. There are “two things I think kids are most fascinated by in weather, our everyday kind of weather,” he said recently at the Manhattan headquarters of “Today,” part of which he also co-hosts: “Why is the sky blue, and what is a rainbow?”
He began to think about making a children’s series about the weather. For years, teachers had been telling him that no subject interested elementary school students more than his own specialty. He just needed time and the right conditions.
Fast-forward almost 20 years, and Roker is finally about to take rainbows into children’s homes, as well as clouds, thunder, lightning, windstorms, hail and even a looming hurricane. These all play starring roles in “Weather Hunters,” a new animated television series he created, which premieres on Sept. 8.
The first PBS Kids show devoted to meteorology — along with a healthy dose of earth science — it explains not only familiar occurrences but also what Roker called “gee whizzy” phenomena.
“We found a few quirky mysteries that I love,” Dete Meserve, the series’s showrunner, said in a video call. Those include the “sailing stones” of Death Valley, Calif., which appear to move under their own power (weather forces actually propel them) and the pink snow at high elevations in Utah, which gets its color from algae.
The series, which Roker developed with Carin Greenberg, an executive producer, is “really trying to take weather as a way to be curious about all things that are elements in nature,” Meserve said.
The show focuses on the Hunters, a family of weather investigators modeled after Roker’s own. (His adult two daughters and son, as well as his toddler granddaughter, Sky, appear in a digital photo album on display in his office.) The series’s voice cast, which includes the actors LeVar Burton, Holly Robinson Peete and Sheryl Lee Ralph, features Roker as Al Hunter, the genial dad.
Al “is an incredibly good-looking bald Black TV weatherman,” he said with a chuckle. But Roker, who is 71 and has a desk treadmill in his work space that he eagerly demonstrated later, added, “He’s actually younger and thinner than I am.”
While Al creates weather reports that his wife, Dot, produces, the spotlight belongs to the Hunters’ middle child, Lily, an inquisitive 8-year-old. She frequently embodies the scientific method, devising theories and testing them. Her 11-year-old sister, Corky, helps by documenting nature with a video camera while their little brother, Benny, 5, draws what he observes.
Many of the children’s investigations are rooted in questions young viewers might have: Why do my glasses fog up outdoors? Why do leaves turn color in the fall? In one episode, the Hunter kids learn what a watershed is when melting snow carries away one of Benny’s toys.
Roker, who approves the series’s scripts but doesn’t write them, said he was most proud of the thought process that “Weather Hunters” encourages: “Create a hypothesis and then either prove it true or not, and if it’s ‘not,’ then what? What’s the explanation?”
The weather-obsessed Hunters also rely on a character whom you might call their spirit guide: Wallace Reed Hunter, the children’s deceased great-grandfather. Burton — known to today’s kids for his mystery podcast, “Sound Detectives,” and to their parents as host of the PBS classic “Reading Rainbow” — voices the role, which brings a rich vein of Black history to the series.
Viewers learn that Great-Grandpa Wallace, a TV newscaster who appears in flashbacks and on old videos, served his country as a meteorologist for the Tuskegee Airmen, the all-Black unit of the World War II Army Air Forces. Roker said he had named the character after Wallace P. Reed, a real officer with the Tuskegee weather detachment.
Wallace connects the Hunters “in ways that none of them anticipate,” Meserve said. Early in the series, when the family moves into Wallace’s old house (the location is never specified), the children find some of his unusual inventions, including the Vansformer, a van that can change into a flying weather station. Like the title vehicle of the 1990s PBS show “The Magic School Bus,” it is a bit of fantasy in a series firmly grounded in science.
Wallace’s presence also enhances what Meserve called the show’s “intergenerational aspect.” Although “Weather Hunters” is geared toward children ages 5 to 8, it is expected to engage older viewers as well. The vocabulary is sophisticated — the Hunters’ fluffy dog is named Cumulus, after the cloud type — and the show presents a steady parade of surprising facts.
“No one’s going to be able to watch this without going, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that,’” Meserve said. In one episode, on a day when rain is forecast, Lily discovers an anthill’s residents plugging holes in the dirt and butterflies hiding in rocky crevices. This leads her to wonder whether the creatures can sense an approaching storm. (Yes, they can.)
The series investigates such subjects unhurriedly. Whereas many children’s shows consist of two 11-minute stories, “Weather Hunters,” explores a single plotline for 22 minutes. One 44-minute special, airing late in the 40-episode first season, takes the Hunters to the wettest, the driest, the hottest and the coldest places on earth. It’s one way the series subtly adverts to climate change.
“Weather Hunters” adopted the longer format after PBS Kids observed its success with another science show, “Wild Kratts.”
“The team felt like it would be nice to give this series that same breathing room,” said Sara DeWitt, senior vice president and general manager, PBS Kids.
Roker, whose office décor reflects his sense of humor — an embroidered pillow is stitched with the saying “God only made so many perfect heads, the rest are covered with hair” — said he appreciated having time to highlight the Hunters’ relationships and interactions, which intentionally evoke the affectionate rhythms of foundational family TV sitcoms. He added that he was particularly influenced by “Family Matters” (1989-98), “which, to me, was one of the warmest sitcoms ever done.”
“And what I loved about it was it wasn’t like, Oh, this is a Black sitcom or a white sitcom,” he said. “This was a sitcom about a family. Happened to be Black.” He said he hoped viewers would see “Weather Hunters” in the same light.
Robinson Peete, who voices Dot Hunter, said that she “couldn’t imagine better timing” for the series, which she sees as a kind of cultural counterweight at a moment when the federal government is ending diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, as well as eliminating multiple avenues of scientific research.
“I think it is going to have a very positive impact on not just kids of color and families of color, but on everyone,” she said.
“Weather Hunters” is also premiering after Congress canceled all federal funding for PBS. This development is not affecting the series’s rollout — it will be accompanied by digital shorts and online games — but DeWitt said she hoped the show would “help people see the importance of noncommercial television for kids.” Its fall season, she added, offers “work that is inspired by what we know kids want to learn.”
And who isn’t curious about why it snows, how fog develops or the perfect recipe for a rainbow?
Roker, who gives that recipe in an episode inspired by his family’s long-ago walk, said: “That’s the idea of the show — here’s stuff that we maybe don’t think about, we take for granted. And here’s the explanation, and it’s like, Wow.”
The post With ‘Weather Hunters,’ Al Roker Finally Brings the Rainbow Home appeared first on New York Times.
