Brian MacMillan stands in front of a large video wall — pointing to it without turning around — and voices out a weather forecast for the Puget Sound area to an unmanned television camera standing 8 feet in front of him. 

MacMillan’s colleagues on FOX 13’s Good Day Seattle broadcast this particular morning — Bill Wixey and John Hopperstad — quietly sit at the nearby anchor desk looking at their cell phones while Abby Acone waits along a separate wall of the large TV studio for her turn to address television viewers with a local traffic report.

For MacMillan, it’s a ritual that he’s been at for more than three years now at FOX 13, presenting weather forecasts — along with viewer poll results, videos of local dogs doing tricks and various other morning news staples — to TV viewers in the Seattle market. And he loves it, believing it is a job he owes to his childhood interest in TV news and opportunities to learn and pursue it starting in Mountlake Terrace.

“I think you’ll hear this a lot from people who work in news, but I was always kind of a news junkie when I was a kid; I wanted to watch the evening news,” MacMillan said. “At the time it was Dan Lewis,  Kathi Goertzen, Steve Pool — you know, Channel 4 — but my family, we also watched all the different stations. It was always something I knew I wanted to do and wanted to pursue. And when I got into it, it just reaffirmed that, yes, this is what I’m meant to do. And I still love it. I still love it now.”

“I’m 43 years old now and I feel like I’ve been doing it since I was 14 years old,” MacMillan said. “And I still enjoy coming to work; it doesn’t feel like work to me.”

MacMillan grew up in the Alderwood area of Lynnwood, going to Hilltop Elementary and Brier Terrace Middle School. Then came four years at Mountlake Terrace High School, a time MacMillan speaks enthusiastically and fondly of.

“They had everything I like to do there,” MacMillan said of his years at Terrace. “They had great sports, they had wonderful music programs — which I was heavily involved in right off the bat — and theater. And what I really loved doing and spent most of my time doing was the broadcasting there.”

As a freshman, MacMillan jumped right into the small HBN (Hawk Broadcasting Network) video production program at MTHS that was then run by now-retired Terrace teacher Ray Johnson. 

“We were in this little, almost like a storage room in the library at first,” MacMillan recalls of the high school’s HBN program run by Johnson in the 1990s. “And he had pieced together enough equipment — and I think he got some grants to buy some things like a switcher and some cameras — and we were able to do the morning announcements. And that’s where really things started forming for me. My career started in that little tiny room adjacent to the library.”

What started as productions of short morning announcement videos presented on the school’s classroom TV’s grew into more elaborate projects for MacMillan and his fellow HBN student journalists at Terrace.

“I really wanted to do basketball play-by-play,” MacMillan said. “So we figured out a way to run a line, a cable, all the way up to the gym. And we did that for three or four cameras. It was so much fun.”

“To be able to have the opportunity to do that then was kind of unmatched,” MacMillan said of Terrace’s HBN, a program still in existence today. “There weren’t other schools doing that or very few doing that at the time. So I feel like it really gave me a nice head start for when I went to college and then, eventually, into the professional world. Because I was able to make my mistakes really young.”

MacMillan also shared how he got to work with the non-defunct CNN Student Bureau that HBN was able to affiliate with for a while. Through that affiliation, MacMillan was able to — among other stories —  cover the Seattle WTO riots in 1999 and to interview a young Tiger Woods. Some of the footage produced from each of those stories ended up airing on CNN, MacMillan said.

“It kind of gave me a lot of confidence very early on to do this whole broadcasting thing,” MacMillan summarized.

After graduating from Mountlake Terrace in 2000, it was off to Washington State University, where MacMillan continued his interest in theater production and performance — he met his wife while in the WSU theater program — and in TV news and video production. He ultimately earned his first of three college degrees, a bachelor’s in broadcast journalism.

After his time in Pullman, MacMillan returned to South Snohomish County and produced television commercials for Destination Marketing, a Mountlake Terrace marketing agency. But the allure of television journalism never subsided. “You know what, I need to do this,” MacMillan remembers thinking at the time about pursuing a career in TV news.

So MacMillan applied for some open positions at a pair of central Oregon TV stations. “I didn’t get a call back for months and I was kind of giving up on it,” MacMillan said. “Then three months later I get a call.”

It was KOHD-TV, a brand new station located in Bend, that wanted to talk to MacMillan about the possibility of having him join their inaugural news operation.

“I had originally applied for a sports position because I love sports,” MacMillan said, “and the news director said, ‘we don’t have a sports job but do you know how to do the weather?’ And I said, ‘yeah, of course I do.’”

While MacMillan had done some weather reporting through the WSU student-run Cable 8 channel in Pullman — a requirement for all students in the program —  it wasn’t necessarily his first choice for a potential career in TV news. But MacMillan also didn’t want this opportunity in Bend to pass him by, so he took the job offer that included doing news reporting during the week and presenting weather forecasts on the weekend.

“There was still some time before the station actually launched and I was able to quickly start going back to school,” MacMillan said. He earned a bachelor’s degree in meteorology from Mississippi State University while working during his two-year stint in Bend. 

After his time at KOHD, MacMillan then took an on-air job in 2009 at Portland’s KPTV-FOX 12, where his ability to understand the science behind weather forecasting grew more.

“One of my now dearest friends, Mark Nelsen, he taught me everything I know,” MacMillan said. “He works at FOX 12 in Portland still. I owe my weather brain to him because he taught me so much about Pacific Northwest weather. He was an incredible mentor; he still is.”

MacMillan spent more than 12 years at FOX 12 in Portland and got very settled in the city, buying a home, starting a family (he and his wife Ashley have two elementary-aged children) and being involved in improv comedy at Portland’s Brody Theater. But returning to Western Washington was always in the back of MacMillan’s mind due to his parents and siblings still living in the area.

MacMillan got the chance to return to the Seattle area in 2021.

“So much about this industry is about timing,” MacMillan noted. “Sometimes when an opening comes up, you’re in the middle of a contract. But this one worked out perfectly for me. And then I was able to work with the previous, wonderful, meteorologist here at FOX13, MJ McDermott, before she left to kind of pass on the torch here.”

MacMillan was hired to replace the then-retiring McDermott at what was then known as Q13, the FOX affiliate and now-named FOX 13 station in Seattle. Since beginning at the station in October 2021, MacMillan has earned his master’s degree in strategic communications from WSU and has been named the station’s chief meteorologist — on the air five mornings a week, four to five-and-a-half hours a day.

MacMillan says he can’t picture himself doing anything else, anywhere else. He’s grateful for his beginnings at Mountlake Terrace High School, his current post at FOX 13 and his proximity to friends and family. He also loves how his parents get to see him daily on their TV. 

“My parents watch everyday; they are both my best supporters and biggest critics,” MacMillan said. “They will let me know by 5:30 if my tie is out of place or if I’m wearing the wrong shirt.”

— Story and photos by Doug Petrowski