Dylan Dreyer is a familiar face to Today show viewers. But just how much do fans know about
her? From her brief appearance on Sex And The City to her past work as a meteorologist
throughout the Northeast, here is the stunning transformation of Dylan Dreyer.
Dylan Dreyer was born and raised in Manalapan, New Jersey, just like her parents. In 2019,
she took Today viewers to the township, revisiting the site of her grandparents' farm and touring
her childhood house alongside her father, who constructed the house himself.
The house tour brought back all the memories for Dreyer. She recalled sitting on the roof
as her father did chores, trying to get a good angle on the pool table in the basement,
dangling from the ceiling above the stairs, and using the reflections on the photo frames
near the staircase to catch a glimpse of the presents under the tree on Christmas morning.
Long before she was a TV star herself, Dylan Dreyer had eyes for Jason Priestley. She told
Today viewers in 2017 that the teen drama Beverly Hills, 90210 was her go-to show everyday
after school when Fox aired reruns. She remembered thinking the show was scandalous and added
-
"I was kind of obsessed."
During the same segment, she got the chance to interview Priestley about his time playing
Brandon Walsh on the show. She also had Priestley autograph her old VHS tapes, of course and
also shared -
"If I wasn't home at 4 o'clock, I would tell my dad to set up the VCR: 'The tape's already
in there, ready to go. Just hit record.'"
As a member of the Class of 1999 at Manalapan High School in New Jersey, Dreyer was passionate
about varsity girls' softball, as she revealed in a 2017 Today show segment when she revisited
the school.
Dreyer reconnected with her old softball coach, who had nothing but praise for the meteorologist,
saying -
"This young lady was the toughest, the fastest, quality person that we had here at Manalapan
for a long time." The sport runs in the family, too: Dreyer's
brother Mike, an Air Force veteran who lost his right lower leg in a construction mishap,
plays softball with the Wounded Warrior Softball Team
Dreyer got her first-ever job at the ice cream shop Jake's Cree-Mee Freeze in her hometown
of Manalapan, and the job even got Dreyer her first onscreen appearance. In the Season
5 finale of the HBO series Sex and the City, you can see a young Dreyer at work in the
shop just behind Sarah Jessica Parker's shoulder.
In a 2018 Today video, Dreyer explained that the Sex and the City location scouts chose
Jake's Cree-Mee Freeze as a "Long Island-y" ice cream shop, even though Manalapan is on
the opposite side of Manhattan as Long Island. And Dreyer also called attention to what might
have been a health code violation for Jake's:
"If you look closely at the video, I wipe my nose!"
Dreyer stayed in New Jersey for college, attending Rutgers University with an eye toward an engineering
degree. In a 2017 NBC News video, she explained that she didn't know what to expect in college.
Unpopularity, unfortunately, might have been one of those new experiences: Dreyer said
that she called herself "Chillin' Dylan" when asked for a nickname in her freshman dorm...
and that didn't help her make any friends.
After Dreyer realized that engineering wasn't her passion, she switched to meteorology,
a major that capitalized on her science and math training up to that point. And she served
as weather anchor for the Rutgers TV network and radio station before she graduated cum
laude from the school in 2003, according to her NBC News bio. Her time at the school helped
her learn some valuable lessons.
"I've also learned a lot of life lessons that you need to have fun, you need to go out with
friends you need to laugh sometimes, but there's certainly a time and place for everything.”
As her onscreen career got going, Dreyer worked as the weekend meteorologist at WICU-TV in
Erie, Pennsylvania, from 2003 to 2005. When she returned to her alma mater in 2013, she
told Rutgers students -
"It was an amazing experience. The station's news director and staff were great. I was
getting paid (the princely sum of $16,000 a year); I was on TV; and I was on my own."
From 2005 to 2007, she served as weekend meteorologist at WJAR-TV in Providence, Rhode Island. And
from 2007 until her Today job started in 2012, she was the weekday morning meteorologist
on Today in New England at WHDH-TV in Boston, Massachusetts. She even won the title of Boston's
Best Meteorologist from Improper Bostonian magazine in 2008, and she has also earned
the American Meteorological Society's Seal of Approval award.
Dylan Dreyer hit the big time in 2012 when she joined NBC's Weekend Today. As she told
Rutgers students the following year.
"There I was on national television, sitting next to Lester Holt, a broadcast icon. I was
sweating, nervous, but it was just like all the other times — you just work on making
the next show better than the current one."
That first day in Rockefeller Center came just weeks before her wedding — and just
a month before Hurricane Sandy hit New York and her native New Jersey. During that storm,
she worked 12-hour shifts in the newsroom day after day, explaining -
"You have to do forecasting practically around the clock before the storm, then you have
to talk non-stop during the storm, and you still can't stop after the storm."
Since joining Today, Dreyer has covered the polar vortex of 2014, Boston's record snowfall
in 2015, and Hurricane Harvey in 2017, and she was on hand for NBC's coverage of the
2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
In July 2011, Dreyer got engaged to Brian Fichera, a studio technician who worked beside
her at station WHDH at the time. According to the couple's wedding website, he started
working at the station a year after she did. As Dreyer wrote -
"I used to think his name was Tom, so our first jokes involved calling each other different
names."
Fichera popped the question on the front porch of his parents' house in Easton, Massachusetts,
with her family and friends hiding in the backyard, excited to congratulate the couple.
Reflecting on the romantic surprise, Dreyer told the Globe:
"When I saw there were roses and two glasses of champagne, I knew."
Dreyer married Fichera in October 2012. She described him on their wedding website, saying
-
"His personality is so laid-back and pleasant, always making people laugh and smile, and
the kind of person everyone wants to be around. He's the reason for my smile [every day]!"
In February 2013, Dreyer was on the way from New York City to Hartford, Connecticut, to
cover a snowstorm when the car she was riding in lost traction in the hazardous driving
conditions. As she told her Today colleagues by phone -
"Typical weather-related accident: We spun around, we got hit, I smashed my head against
the window."
After the accident, Dreyer went to the ER, where doctors told her she had gotten her
first-ever concussion. She even showed off the big bump on her head on Twitter.
Worse yet, Dreyer couldn't provide coverage of the blizzard in her impaired state, something
she wasn't happy about.
Dreyer and her husband became first-time parents in December 2016 when their son, Calvin Bradley
Fichera, was born.
Dreyer had announced that she was expecting on Today six months earlier.
"Look it really says 'are you pregnant?' and Yes I am!"
"What?!"
"Yes she is!"
"You're kidding me!"
"Shut the front door!"
In a blog post on the morning show's website, she admitted that she and her husband had
once sworn off the prospect of becoming parents! But Dreyer described how the sonogram image
of her incoming bundle of joy filled her with the maternal love her friends had told her
about but couldn't properly articulate, writing -
"When I saw this little guy and watched him dance around and touch his hand to his face,
I fell in love instantly. A love I, too, can't put into words."
Dreyer was on the ground in Florida in September 2017 as Hurricane Irma made landfall. After
she returned to the Today studio in New York, Dreyer told viewers about the experience,
saying that storm-chasing wasn't her area of expertise, but in terms of storms, Irma
was impressive -
"Going into, at the time, a Category 5 hurricane, even if it weakened to a Category 4, I really
didn't know what to expect with 150 mile-per-hour winds."
Even though she had a capable crew at her side and they had found shelter at a hotel,
she was scared — and she said as much to her husband in a text.
He texted back to reassure her, saying -
"And if you can give birth and raise a child, you can do anything."
In April 2019, Dreyer opened up on Today about her struggles to give son Calvin a younger
sibling, telling viewers that she had a miscarriage as a result of secondary infertility. An OB/GYN
found out that Dreyer had a very low egg count, and a fertility specialist discovered that
Dreyer's uterus was partially scarred shut as a result of her previous C-section. The
doctor cleared the scar tissue in a surgery, and Dreyer became pregnant soon after.
Five weeks after her positive pregnancy test, however, Dreyer started bleeding, and she
told her husband that she thought she lost the baby. Fichera tried to assure her, and
her doctor said the bleeding was a fluke, but it didn't stop. Sadly, a few days later,
the doctor informed Dreyer about the miscarriage.
On air, Dreyer told viewers that she wanted to share her story to help get rid of the
stigma around fertility issues.
In January 2020, Dreyer finally got her wish for a second child when she welcomed her son
Oliver George Fichera into the world. Dreyer called into the show the following day and
told her co-hosts -
"I just feel so happy and so blessed. I just got all my drugs, so I'm doing just fine!"
Dreyer also said that Oliver became a frontrunner for the baby's name after she noticed a lot
of signs — like when she picked up a suit for her husband from the London store Oliver
Brown during her coverage of the Royal Ascot horse race.
Baby Number 2 made the family feel complete, with Dreyer saying -
"It was a long time coming. This year started off a lot differently than the way it ended."
Dylan Dreyer bared her soul in January 2021, opening up about her experience with breastfeeding.
In an Instagram post, she shared that pumping breastmilk for second son Oliver gave her
dysphoria, which she described as a sensation of nausea mixed with, quote, "a momentary
fleeting feeling of hatred toward everyone and everything in the moment."
Even after a year of that unpleasantness, though, Dreyer said she found it extremely
difficult to stop breastfeeding and wondered if she was just experiencing hormones or if
she was feeling sad that she was leaving that chapter of motherhood behind, adding -
"No one talks about the emotional toll stopping breastfeeding takes on a mom. No one, not
a single person, not a single doctor, not even myself having gone through this with
[first son] Calvin, told me what a mind f--- this would be."
Dreyer also gave a shout-out to other breastfeeding parents who are going through the same thing.
From 2016 to 2017, Dreyer hosted Journey with Dylan Dreyer, a morning NBC docuseries in
which she covered topics ranging from ancient Egyptian rulers to Kilimanjaro mountain climbers
to Amazon forest-dwellers.
That show begat another NBC Saturday morning show, Earth Odyssey with Dylan Dreyer, the
third season of which debuted in 2021.
Dreyer raved about that hosting gig in a 2019 WBIR.com interview as she filmed an intro
for the show alongside penguins at a Tennessee aquarium, proclaiming her love for science
and adding -
"So often I'm in a studio. It's actually good to go out and film the intros and outros in
the aquariums. My only thing that I am sad about is that I never have time to bring Calvin,
my 2-year-old, who would absolutely love every single inch of these aquariums."
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