Sam Champion’s new nighttime Weather Channel show will be called “23.5 Degrees with Sam Champion” — and will be shot in newly constructed studios in Atlanta and in Manhattan (on 44th & Broadway) once it premieres (likely sometime in February).
“The reason we picked that title is I wanted something to reach out to our fans, to people who are science-based,” says Champion. “I didn’t want the name of the show to be so immediate. People who love the climate, love the environment and love space understand that the earth is on an actual tilt [23.5 degrees], which is the key ingredient to making us a hospitable planet.”
The hour-long “23.5 Degrees” will feature Champion interviewing a wide variety of experts vis a vis weather-related topics (he expects the interviews to be 11-to-15 minutes long). “We may even replay the show in 30-minute breaks late at night or early in the morning,” he says, noting that he’ll split his time between New York and Atlanta.
WATCH: @SamChampion called @LaraSpencer ‘Laura’ on accident and she isn’t letting him live it down! 😂 https://t.co/yGBBrZOqqu
— Good Morning America (@GMA) January 12, 2016
Champion, who’s back on “Good Morning America” this week subbing for Ginger Zee (who’s on maternity leave) scotches the talk that there’s a hidden agenda to his return (he left “GMA” in 2013). “ABC has a small [weather] team and to run Rob [Marciano] constantly on the weekend and weekdays … they started looking around and asked me to fill in for a week so they could give some people a rest,” he says. “It happened at the perfect time; had I not been working on my nighttime show I couldn’t do it. I don’t know how else to explain it. It’s a remarkable coincidence of the planets aligning.”
Champion also sounded off about how the press reported his departure from “AMHQ,” the Weather Channel morning show he launched in March 2014. “I started reading that I was kicked off the show and that really upset me. And when I read that the show was cancelled [it wasn’t] that really upset me,” he says. “I left ‘GMA’ to become the managing editor of the Weather Channel. I wasn’t building a morning show for me. I had to create a destination in the morning for weather fanatics … and it took a couple of years to get the right team in place. In my mind, Jim Cantore was always going to be the anchor of ‘AMHQ.’ He’s the standout star of the Weather Channel.”