The surprising return of Dagmar Midcap to Atlanta TV
In 2009, Dagmar Midcap was riding high in Atlanta as a popular weather forecaster on the CBS affiliate WGCL-TV. Fans embraced her effervescent, engaging personality. The station even gave her a billboard.
She had a boyfriend and they purchased a home in Decatur.
But her life came crashing down after he took his own life. Traumatized, she could barely function at her job. Everything in Atlanta reminded her of him.
So Midcap abruptly quit her job in 2010 and left town with no intention of returning.
But in 2025, Midcap came back to metro Atlanta and recently landed a jobas a meteorologist at the new CBS Atlanta (WUPA-TV). Her previous station, now called Atlanta News First (WANF-TV) was purchased by Atlanta-based Gray Media in 2021, dropped its CBS affiliation last year and is now independent.
“They really wanted me, which is kind of surprising to be honest,” Midcap told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution during lunch at the Silver Skillet in Midtown, the same location she did an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2010 after she quit. “I wasn’t originally planning on this.”
CBS Atlanta news director Shawn Hoder was already a fan of Midcap’s when he worked at rival station 11Alive (WXIA-TV) in the late 2000s. So he was excited when she came in for a job interview last fall while he was building a TV station from scratch.
“I always liked the way she interacted through the lens being herself,” Hoder said. “Dagmar on camera is Dagmar in person. That stands out. The way she cares comes out on screen.”
Hoder has a core hiring policy: No jerks.
So far, he’s kept his word, Midcap said. “I might be the weakest link, but they actually hired non-jerks,” she said. “That makes the biggest difference.”
Hockey and a cult
Midcap grew up on the outskirts of Vancouver, British Columbia, among orchards, gardens and cows. “My mom taught us to respect nature,” she said.
Inspired by Vancouver Canucks goalie Richard Brodeur, she became a goalie, playing ice hockey in middle and high school. “It’s like my personality,” she said. “It’s the last line of defense. I love that feeling.”
Aside from hockey, though, she said she always felt like an outsider because her parents were part of a church group led by Ohio’s Ernest Angley, whose Grace Cathedral has been described as a cult by former members who spoke to the Akron Beacon Journal in 2014.
Having spent 25 years in his grasp, Midcap agrees with that assessment. Her parents discovered Angley in the 1970s as host of the globally syndicated show “The Ernest Angley Hour.” (Angley denied being a cult leader and died in 2021 at age 99.)
“I wasn’t allowed to cut my hair until 11th grade,” Midcap said. “I had long braids that ran past my knees. I felt like Ally Sheedy’s character in ‘The Breakfast Club’ except she was cool compared to me!”
At age 19, Midcap said Grace Cathedral forced her to marry a man in the church at headquarters in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, “or I would go to hell,” she said. “For years, I was totally brainwashed. I thought we would be raptured by the age of 30. We weren’t even allowed to listen to Christian music.”
She said she was sexually assaulted over the years and at age 30, she rebelled. She divorced her husband, left the church and with two suitcases and $75, moved back to Vancouver, where her parents still lived.
A year later, a friend told her about an opening at a local TV station doing weather. “I had no marketable skills,” she said. “I had barely graduated high school.”
Like the weather
But Midcap’s natural beauty and charm helped her land a weather forecasting job at VTV. She later did fill-in work at larger station and co-hosted “Driving Television,” where she tested new motorcycles and automobiles.
“I loved the bikes more than the cars,” Midcap said. “Two wheels on the track, baby! It was that challenge to connect mind to body that was similar to picking a puck out of the air. My brain and body likes that stuff.”
She also co-hosted reality show “Crash Test Mommy,” a Canadian version of “Wife Swap.” “I wasn’t a mom, so I felt like the moms weren’t able to connect with me,” she said. She left after one season.
In fact, this type of TV hosting didn’t feel like a career play for her: “I knew at the time I wasn’t fully where I needed to go or be on this Earth. It was a deeply emotional undertaking at times, trying to figure out who I was rather than what I was told I was or who I was.”
In 2007, Midcap’s agent told her about a a morning weather forecasting job opening in Atlanta at struggling last-place station WGCL-TV. “I didn’t want to go, to be very honest,” she said. “I said no twice. They thought I was playing hardball and came back with more money.”
She decided to try WGCL for a year or two and see how it went. Viewers immediately loved herand she was quickly moved to evenings. Soon, radio hosts were fawning over her and management spent money promoting her visage.
Soon after moving to Atlanta, she also met an attractive medical salesperson at her apartment complex after complaining about the heat. “In that sweet Southern drawl, he told me, ‘Toughen up, buttercup!’” she said. “I wasn’t sure if I should be upset or charmed. I went for charmed.”
They moved in together, but,beset by anxiety and fear, he took his own life in 2009. (Midcap requested not to include his name given the circumstances of his death.)
“I missed the signs,” Midcap said. “Shattered me in many ways. That guy I will never get over.”
Stay classy, San Diego
In 2010, she moved to Los Angeles, where she nabbed a few acting roles, many as a newscaster. After a year, she decided to try TV news again and landed a weather forecasting job at the NBC affiliate in San Diego.
There, she found relative peace and stability. She also finally got a degree in meteorology.
Monica Dean, a longtime anchor and reporter at NBC 7, called Midcap a “whirlwind of energy,” lauding her “laughter, quick wit and big personality.”
She also saw how Midcap had a “whimsical, engaging quality to the way she presented the weather that resonated with our audience.”
Midcap was also able to showcase her love for animals, a level of “compassion everyone recognized right away,” Dean said.
In regular segments and specials, she highlighted animal conservation and illegal wildlife trade.
“She always looked at the big picture,” said Nina Thompson, Midcap’s producer at the station for several years before becoming the head of public relations for the San Diego Humane Society in 2018. “It wasn’t just the weather for her. It was being a good citizen and good human.”
Welcome (back) to Atlanta
Her interest in investigating animal poaching in foreign countries led her to leave NBC 7 in 2024. She decided to decamp to metro Atlanta again as her home base because the airport made it easier to travel overseas.
She spent several months collecting stories in places like Madagascar with the Duke Lemur Center, an elephant orphanage in Kenya and a wildlife trust in Malawi. She has worked to help move an endangered Persian leopard from Pakistan to a sanctuary in the United States.
For a time, she lived at Serenbe, the 1,000-acre planned community 30 miles southwest of Atlanta where she could commune with nature and avoid the hubbub of the city.
“I tend to be a loner,” she said, despite her seemingly extroverted persona on TV. “During a newsroom meeting, I’m the one in the back corner of the room. It’s a lot for me to be on camera but not as much as it would be if I had to do public speaking and was in a room full of people. A camera lens is easier.”
She said she has just one close friend in Atlanta: Kelly Wolcott, a licensed esthetician Midcap met in the late 2000s and bonded with. “We call each other sisters,” Wolcott said. “It helps that we’re both redheads. We don’t do anything too exciting. We hang at my house. My husband cooks and plays guitar. We take hikes at Serenbe. It’s all very peaceful.”
Wolcott admires Midcap’s fearlessness: “She will do whatever it takes to help those who can’t help themselves.”
Last year, Midcap began seeking steadier work and found CBS Atlanta. She moved back into the city and lives in Morningside with two rescue dogs: three-legged Beta and Bindi, who is named after the daughter of her hero, late conservationist Steve Irwin.
Midcap is gradually venturing around Atlanta again, though it’s been a slow process to deal with the residual pain from her boyfriend’s death. “I know it’s the healthier thing to do than just keep burying it and repressing it,” she said. “It took me a long time to even acknowledge it and face it in therapy. I have to process this at my own pace and speed.”
About the Author
Rodney Ho writes about entertainment for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution including TV, radio, film, comedy and all things in between. A native New Yorker, he has covered education at The Virginian-Pilot, small business for The Wall Street Journal and a host of beats at the AJC over 20-plus years. He loves tennis, pop culture & seeing live events.
