Growing up, Al Roker loved animation. His Saturday mornings were devoted to Bugs Bunny and Road Runner, and he would spend hours studying Preston Blair’s book on how to draw cartoons. He dreamed of becoming an animator for Walt Disney. But when he grew up and became the “Today” weatherman instead, he had the idea to combine his love of weather with his love of animation into a children’s TV series.
“Weather Hunters,” premiering Monday on PBS Kids, follows 8-year-old Lily Hunter (Tandi Fomukong) as she, her younger brother, Benny (Lorenzo Ross) and her older sister, Corky (Kapri Ladd), investigate the weather with the help of their parents, Dot (Holly Robinson Peete) and Al (Roker). The children in the series are based on Roker’s own three children: Courtney, Leila and Nick. And in a case of art fondly imitating life, Roker’s Al Hunter is a local weatherman with a penchant for dad jokes.
“This really is one of those instances where everything that you love in your life comes together,” Roker says. “The show reflects what my childhood was. My parents were very supportive of their children and what their dreams were.”
Roker has been developing the show since his now-adult children were the ages the Hunter kids are in the series. “Good things come to those who wait,” he says with a laugh.
“This is a real passion project for him,” says Sara DeWitt, senior vice president and general manager of PBS Kids. “We love to have a creator who is so excited about getting kids interested in the world.”
For PBS Kids, a series rooted in weather exploration was a natural extension to its current slate of programming. “Weather plays such a big part of kids’ lives,” DeWitt says. “What should I wear today? What if it rains and I can’t do the thing I was planning to do? Where does that thunder come from? It just immediately opened up so many ideas and possibilities for us about ways we could really connect with families and get them more excited about the scientific topic.”
Over the course of the first 10 episodes, all of which will premiere digitally on PBS Kids at launch, Lily and her family will investigate things like fog, clouds, leaves changing colors, thunderstorms, snow and the moving rocks of the desert. Sara Sweetman, an associate professor at University of Rhode Island, is an educational advisor for the series. “Weather is such fantastic content because it is very relevant to the kids’ lives,” she says. “They understand why it’s important and how it impacts them.”
But weather science, like all science, can get complex pretty quickly. “I was really adamant that there’d be one takeaway message [in each episode],” Sweetman says. “What we really want is [for] kids to watch the show and then run into the kitchen to find their dad or their mom and say, ‘Guess what?’ and be able to state that one idea really clearly.”
Sweetman was involved in each 22-minute episode from the very first pitch. “The ideal situation for educational media is that we hit the learning moment at the same moment as the emotional arc of the story,” she says. “We know from research when we can do that, that kids take that meaning away and hold on to it.”
Peete, the voice of Dot, has been friends with Roker for years. She starred in Hallmark’s “Morning Show Mysteries,” which Roker produced and was based on Roker’s novels. For Peete, whose father, Matthew Robinson Jr., was the original Gordon on “Sesame Street,” starring in the series is a “full-circle moment.” “PBS just meant so much to me,” she says. “It’s one thing for your dad to be on TV. It’s nothing for your dad to be on like the best TV children’s TV show ever. I wish my dad could see that I was actually on PBS doing this type of show with Al. He would be very, very proud that I would continue this legacy of children’s entertainment and education.”
Executive producer and showrunner Dete Meserve says animation allows the series, which is aimed at children ages 5 to 8, to have flights of fancy like the flying mobile weather station known as the Vansformer that the family explores in combined with “reality-based scientific explanations for what’s happening.” The episode on clouds explains how even though Benny can no longer see the sun behind the clouds, the sun is still there.
All kids are scientists, says Meserve, and it’s particularly nice that the character at the center of this series is a young girl interested in science. “There’s research that shows that if she can see it, she can be it,” Meserve says. “And Lily is surrounded by her siblings who have an equal interest, but the way they interact with it is different. Corky wants to film and document it. And then you have Benny, who’s more the artistic part of it. He wants to draw.”
The show also seeks to make some weather phenomena like hurricanes or thunderstorms less scary by helping the young audience understand the science behind what is happening. “We’re explaining what it is and how it works,” Roker says. “Kids can feel some sense of empowerment. In the show we talk about, how do we, as a family, prepare? How do we protect ourselves? How do we keep ourselves safe?”
Throughout the series Lily will form hypotheses and test them to see if the facts fit what she originally thought. “Those are all things that I think the show excels at — helping create those skills for critical thinking that kids can take forward as they get older,” Roker says.
He also hopes children walk away with a sense of the true beauty of weather. “There’s really this magic that happens around us,” he says. “And it’s based in science.”
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