Watch: Craig Melvin Breaks Silence on ‘Today’ Show Intruder Arrest
Craig Melvin talks for a living, but he forgot his words for a second when he met his future wife, Lindsay Czarniak.
The Todayco-anchor knew who Czarniak was when he joined Washington, D.C.’s NBC affiliate WRC-TV in 2008, where she already worked as a sportscaster, but she had been in Beijing covering the Olympics when Melvin started at the station. One night they were coming back from commercial and he was expecting to see the guy who’d been filling in for her, but she was there instead.
“I’m like, ‘Oh, hey, uh,’ and so I got a little tongue-tied,” Melvin recalled to Today host Jenna Bush-Hager in November. “I was like, ‘Hey, welcome back from the Olympics,’ and she’s like, ‘Welcome to Channel 4, loser.'”
But, he quickly clarified, “She didn’t say ‘loser.'”
And because they were in the middle of a broadcast, cameras were rolling the whole time.
Whoever was watching the news that night saw Melvin introduce Czarniak with, “Well, look who’s back from China!” She replied, “Oh, hello, Craig Melvin. I’ve never met you before. Good to meet you!”
“She pulled the video for our rehearsal dinner,” Melvin told Bush Hager. “So, we met on the air. I guess technically we did. We met on NBC.”
Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images
But the 47-year-old showed no network favoritism when he shared on Instagram Aug. 9 that Czarniak would be starting a new gig as a host for streamer CBS Sports HQ.
“Stoked. Happy. Proud,” Melvin wrote.
And that’s how it’s been since the former colleagues decided to take a shot at love, the spouses of almost 15 years remaining each other’s biggest fan—as well as teammates in parenting son Delano, 12, and daughter Sybil, 9.
Making a surprise appearance with their kids on Today when Melvin made his debut as co-anchor in January 2025, Czarniak said, “What makes me so proud is just the person that Craig is. And understanding that it’s the kindness and how genuine he is … we’re just excited and pumped.”
Melvin subsequently called Czarniak the “best thing that’s ever happened to me personally and professionally,” telling People, “She doesn’t just get me as a person, as a husband — she understands the business.”
Nathan Congleton/NBC via Getty Images
And his wife remains his “favorite broadcaster on the planet,” he said in introducing her on the July 29 episode of his Glass Half Full podcast. So, he quipped, “I think you’ll enjoy the conversation, edited heavily.”
Czarniak, meanwhile, told him that she almost wore the red button-down shirt from J.Crew “that I saved in the closet because it’s what I was wearing the night I met you on set.”
He asked why she didn’t wear it and the Game Day Murders host offered to go get it. To which Melvin cracked, “Don’t do that, because now it’s weird.”
But he remembered the outfit from what he considers a bygone era.
“This was when you could do that,” Melvin told Bush Hager. “You could meet at work. You could date at work.”
Yet though he was smitten from day one, Czarniak took her time deciding whether to take their casual romance to the next level.
“I had not been in that position before,” she told the Washington Post in 2011. “I didn’t want to screw anything up.”
Melvin told her in April 2009 that he was ready for a relationship.
“I made up my mind,” he told the Post. “And I said: ‘Listen, I want this to work. I don’t see why it shouldn’t work.'”
Czarniak, however, wasn’t on the same page yet. “He was basically was like, ‘Either you’re in or you’re out,’” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Then I’m out—’cause I can’t be in.'”
Admittedly wounded—”She wasn’t into me,” Melvin said, “and that was burning me up”—they parted ways. But they rekindled their friendship and Melvin couldn’t shake the feeling that she was the one.
Nathan Congleton/NBC via Getty Images
So, she agreed to have drinks in July 2009 and, Czarniak shared, “there was something that clicked. And it was wasn’t necessarily that I knew, ‘I have to be with this guy.’ But it was like, ‘I don’t want to be with anyone else that I’d hung out with.'”
Once they finally went on their first real date in October 2009, it was full speed ahead, Czarniak noting, “We just wanted to hang out all the time.”
On March 31, 2011, he chartered a sailboat during a weekend away in Miami and proposed. It was, as he put it while marking the 12th anniversary of his proposal on Today, “the most important day of my life.”
As he recalled, “I got down on one knee and scripted the whole thing in my head and then I popped the question. And Lindsay’s response was, ‘I think I’m gonna throw up.’”
Riccardo S. Savi/Getty Images
They moved to Westport, Conn., to be between their respective jobs at NBC News in New York and ESPN in Bristol, with Melvin telling the New York Times in 2025, “Kind of the only thing we cared about was that our commutes were similar in each other’s in length and that we were near a train station.”
He and Czarniak tied the knot Oct. 15 at Church of the Holy City in D.C. in front of about 200 guests, including former WRC colleagues who always suspected they were secretly dating.
Lindsay Czarniak/Instagram
Delano was born in March 2014 and Sybil followed in November 2016—and the family upgraded in 2021 to a six-bedroom colonial in Westport.
Their basement, where they installed a bar, restaurant-style booth and massive TV, is their “favorite space” in the house, Melvin told the Times. “When I’m not traveling and Lindsay’s not traveling this is where we all have dinner on Sunday. A booth forces you to be close.”
Though it’s not as if he and Czarniak need much help in that department.
Marking 14 years of marriage last October, she captioned a fall-themed snap of the couple, “I do indeed love you more than when we made it official and feel like the luckiest girl in the pumpkin patch to have you by my side.”
See more sweet pics of all the Today talent and their families:
Photo by: Nathan Congleton/NBC via Getty Images
Craig Melvin / Instagram
Jenna Bush Hager / Instagram
Lester Holt / Instagram
Steve Mack/Getty Images
Noam Galai/WireImage
Paul Zimmerman/WireImage
