It’s a Tuesday morning, mid-July, and GMA3 anchor Eva Pilgrim is surrounded by ABC staff in the greenroom at the network’s Times Square Studios. The longtime Good Morning America Weekend anchor made the jump to the program’s afternoon spinoff a year and a half ago, but she still contributes to Good Morning America and she still keeps Good Morning America hours.
“Depending on where I fall in the news cycle, and where my story is in the news cycle, I could be here really early. Or if I have to fill in for GMA then I’m here exceptionally early,” she says. “And then every once in a blue moon I don’t have an assignment on GMA, and I can come in at like 7:30 or 8:00.” The TV news veteran pauses for a beat. “That happens almost never.”
Pilgrim has now been a fixture of TV news for 20 years — more if you count her local news experience while an undergraduate at the University of South Carolina — and the ’04 broadcast journalism graduate is as polished as they come. But while she has been in New York since 2015, when she left ABC’s Philadelphia affiliate to join the national network, she is still very much a Southerner, and more specifically, a South Carolinian.
“Where you’re raised is an intrinsic part of who you are. My grandfather is a Southern Baptist preacher. I was sitting in church every Sunday,” she says. “And, you know, I love to bring a casserole to a group gathering. That’s not a thing a New Yorker does, right?”
Her producer is standing in the doorway, and Pilgrim smiles at her as she shares an anecdote: “I was trying to explain to some of my girlfriends here about the virtues of Jell-O fruit salad. They were so confused that it wasn’t a dessert. I was like, ‘No! It’s a salad!’’
Laughter ripples through the room — the Jell-O salad bit could work just as well on air — but the laughter dissipates as Pilgrim pulls back to her point. “A huge part of my success, I think, has been, I’m not a New Yorker,’” she says. “I live in New York.”
She’s not knocking her adopted city. New York has been good to her; it’s where she wants to be. She’s simply defining the city on her own terms.
“People think of New York as this big city, hustle and bustle, but it can also be what you choose to make it,” she says. “I did live the hustle and bustle life for a very long time — I was a single young person in the city, living it up for a while — but you can also have something very different.”
Until recently — until tomorrow, in fact, when Pilgrim, husband Ed Hartigan and two-year-old daughter Ella are relocating to the suburbs — “something very different” has meant the relative quiet of her Brooklyn neighborhood.
For the past few months, a typical Saturday has included taking Ella to swim lessons, hitting a local bakery for a treat, squeezing in a nap “because we’re on a schedule,” then watching Ella play in a neighborhood splash pad.
Pilgrim still gets up early to watch GMA every weekend, and her producer still calls if there’s major breaking news, but she is otherwise “pretty checked out” once she’s off the clock. “It was a choice that I needed to put my phone in the corner or else I was going to miss the fun parts of having a two-year-old,” she says.
It was also a choice to move a little further from the dizzying demands of the day job. Pilgrim will miss socializing from her Brooklyn stoop on Saturday and Sunday afternoons — “We’re close to most of our neighbors on our street,” she says — but as her family puts down roots beyond the hustle and bustle, other rewards await.
“Basically, I’ll be living in an area very much like where I grew up. It’s really not that different,” says the Lexington, South Carolina native. “My daughter is going to walk to elementary school.”