Cecily Tynan Gets the David Muir Treatment
She gave her last 6ABC broadcast on Monday night.
David Muir gives Cecily Tynan a happy retirement message on World News Tonight / Courtesy of ABC)
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Local news personalities come. And local news personalities go. But when you’re Cecily Tynan, things are a little bit different: you wind up being feted on World News Tonight by none other than David Muir, one of the best-known and most-respected news anchors in the world.
That’s exactly what happened on Tuesday, on the first day of Tynan’s retirement after nearly 31 years at 6ABC. As World News Tonight was about to make way for Jeopardy!, Muir called Tynan “a beloved member of the ABC family” and launched a nostalgic series of clips of Tynan forecasting the weather over the years. He touted her “true connection with viewers” and added, “Everybody knows Cecily” before telling her with handsome smirk, “I’ll be looking for you waterskiing, Cecily.” (Tynan is an avid waterskier.) Tynan said that the segment caught her completely by surprise.
Muir really got it right when he referred to Tynan’s connection with those on the other side of the screen. Viewers became obsessed with Tynan not long after her arrival here in 1995. Her name turned up not infrequently in gossip columns by Dan Gross and Stu Bykofsky, back when Philly had gossip columns. And once the age of social media dawned, she became a true celebrity.
Tynan would share her adventures like waterskiing in the Poconos and racing in the Broad Street Run on social media, much to the delight of her throngs of followers. For better or worse, her appearance was the subject of much attention, like when she debuted a dramatically different hairdo in January 2025. Naturally, everybody wanted to know who styled her hair. (Chuck at Nirvana Hair Gallery in Delco. You’re welcome.)
Her fans delighted when she responded online to negative comments about her looks, and when she took on Marjorie Taylor Greene for claiming that an unspecified “they” control the weather in the wake of a hurricane. “Just to clarify, no, the government did not produce Hurricane Milton, or any other hurricane, for that matter,” Tynan wrote online. “I really can’t believe I have to post this.”
She was even more relatable when she admitted that her Wawa order was a Turkey Shorti, that she has terrible feet due to ballet dancing and all that running (she referred to her own toes as “E.T. toes”), and that she’s addicted to I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter – in spray form, no less. “I consider it liquid gold,” she said.
On Monday night, during her final broadcast, she held back tears as she said goodbye to her colleagues and to generations of viewers and remembered key moments, like when she had to learn to pronounce “Conshohocken” and “Schuylkill” when she moved to Philly. She talked about her live segments from the Philadelphia Zoo, when viewers wondered how long it would be before another animal peed on her. She remembered the Blizzard of ’96 and Super Storm Sandy. And then, the clock changed from 6:59 p.m. to 7 p.m., and “THIS. IS. JEOPARDY” blared from the speakers. End of an era.
