TV Talk: WTAE anchor to depart, another Mister Rogers statue unveiled

WTAE weekend morning anchor Chris Lovingood will depart the station by the end of July after a three-year stint at the ABC affiliate.

Lovingood joined WTAE in 2018 from a station in Fort Myers, Fla.

In a Facebook post, Lovingood said he’ll move to WRAL-TV in Raleigh, N.C.

“They have a star-studded team down there and it legitimately feels like a dream to be able to say I’ll be among them,” he wrote. “This well-respected station is doing some fantastic journalism and storytelling, and I am EAGER to head there in August.”

He described his first six months at WTAE as “some of the most intense in my career and I was silently reeling from it, but persisted because I wanted to tell stories from our local communities — *your* stories.”

In a phone interview Monday, Lovingood said early in his stint at WTAE he covered Antwon Rose II shooting protests, a train derailment and the Tree of Life Synagogue shootings.

“It was a big market, I really got to prove myself here and I like to think I rolled with the punches but emotionally, especially talking to family members impacted by the synagogue shootings, it was a lot,” Lovingood said. “After the synagogue shooting, I had to call families and confirm their loved one was in there. These are real people; they aren’t just numbers and names.”

Lovingood said WTAE has been a great place for him to work but he couldn’t pass up the opportunity offered by WRAL, where he’ll work a Monday-Friday shift, reporting initially before eventually getting behind the anchor desk.

“It is well known, it is well respected, it is like getting a call to go to the majors,” Lovingood said. “I can’t pass that up.”

Another Mister Rogers statue

Following sculptures on the North Shore and in his hometown of Latrobe, it seemed like the next statue of the late PBS children’s show host Fred Rogers would be at his alma mater, Florida’s Rollins College, due to be installed this summer and dedicated in the fall.

But another Mister Rogers statue snuck in ahead of the Rollins piece. A Mister Rogers statue was unveiled June 22 in Nantucket, Mass., where Rogers owned a summer home.

Michelle Keeler never met Fred Rogers but other members of her family did.

“Nantucketers love to tell of their Fred encounters on the island,” she says. “He was just a regular guy here going out to restaurants and such. He loved how he could escape the TV world by coming to Nantucket.”

Keeler began raising funds for the sculpture in 2018 after watching a Mister Rogers documentary while her father was dying of Alzheimer’s disease.

“I’m not sure if I was summoned from above to be an ambassador for what Fred believed in or if it was a gentle nudge from my father to do something that makes everyone smile,” Keeler said at the June 22 unveiling that was attended by Fred and Joanne Rogers’ son, John. “Most likely it was a combination of both that propelled me into such a wonderful project.”

The statue was one of the last works by artist Seward Johnson, who completed work on the clay bust used to cast the statue’s head in September 2019 prior to his death in March 2020. (Seward’s team of artists at Seward Johnson Atelier completed the statue to Johnson’s specifications, Keeler said.) Johnson is best known for hyper-realistic sculptures, including a recreation of the famous photo of a sailor kissing a nurse at the end of World War II.

Keeler said the statue of Mister Rogers cost $140,000 with more than $100,000 raised at a party hosted by Wendy Schmidt, wife of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in August 2019. The statue is located at the Dreamland, a theater and cultural center in Nantucket.

Emmy love for ‘Odd Squad’

On Friday PBS’s “Odd Squad,” produced by Pittsburgh-based Fred Rogers Productions, won two of the three Daytime Emmy Awards it was nominated for in the categories of lighting direction (beating “Sesame Street,” “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” and “The Talk”) and art direction/set decoration/scenic design (beating HBO Max’s “Craftopia,” “The Kelly Clarkson Show,” Netflix’s “The New Legends of Money” and National Geographic Kids’ “Weird But True”).

On Monday, Fred Rogers Productions shows received additional nominations for the 48th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards Children’s & Animation and Lifestyle categories. “Odd Squad” was nominated for outstanding preschool, children’s or family viewing program.

“Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” executive produced by Mt. Lebanon native Dave Filoni, received nominations for outstanding writing team for an animated program, outstanding music direction and composition and sound mixing/sound editing.

The Daytime Emmy Awards Children’s & Animation and Lifestyle categories winners will be announced in live streaming events July 17 and 18 at theemmys.tv.

Film tax credit

In March state Sen. Camera Bartolotta (R-Washington) introduced legislation to raise Pennsylvania’s film tax credit cap from $70 million to $125 million annually but the Pennsylvania legislature did not include that expansion in the commonwealth’s 2021-22 budget, leaving the incentive program at its current $70 million level.