“Hey!” Liza Fromer greets me energetically at the door of her modest Annex townhouse on a dreary summer’s morning. She manages to be boisterous yet laid-back; perky, but not in an aggressively type-A, Katie Couric way. Her one-year-old son, Samson, is bouncing on her hip and clutching at her blonde hair with a dimpled fist. I feel like I know Fromer already, and not only because I’ve seen her on TV. She’s mastered a perfectly familiar best-friend persona.

In her five-year tenure on Citytv’s Breakfast Television, 37-year-old Fromer was the morning co-host par excellence. While the news anchor plays the sober messenger, the a.m. personality is the cheerful, silver-lining companion: cute (but not movie star glam), bubbly (without being an espresso-addled hysteric) and always game. Her next role is as host of The List, airing this fall on Slice. The premise, helping people cross pipe dreams off their life list, has Fromer accompanying them as they go wild for a day. The show sees her flying loop-the-loop in a biplane, traipsing over hot coals, performing standup at the Laugh Resort and singing backup at an INXS concert in Barrie.

“I’m like your immediate best friend, the cool buddy who always prods you to do this thing you want to do, to help make it possible,” Fromer says as we sit down for tea and freshly baked muffins in her living room. She lives with her husband of two years, Josh Gerstein, who works in finance on Bay Street. They met at West Lounge, a bar on King. She was out with a girlfriend to watch hockey and eat nachos, and thought he was cute. “It’s the classic Cinderella story,” she laughs. “I kind of followed him around. I was trying to get in proximity to do a casual ‘Hi.’ ” Their house is cozy, but not stylish or trendy. The family cat, Tiger, a portly orange Himalayan, snores next to us on the couch. Clearly, Tiger is not a morning person, and Fromer, despite her time at BT, claims she’s not, either. “Every day when the alarm went off at 4, I thought, I can’t! I cannot do this! I would sign away my paycheque for two weeks if I could stay in bed today.”

Raised in Kitchener, Fromer (an only child) never had a burning desire to be on television. She thought she might teach, but settled on Ryerson’s radio and television program at the last minute, partly because she wanted to live in Toronto. While at school, she volunteered at the Q107 newsroom, but radio wasn’t a good fit: “I felt nervous, thinking maybe I didn’t sound great. Then, the minute I did anything on TV, I was like, God, well this just feels totally fine, no problem.” After graduation, a year and a half waitressing at Joe Badali’s on Front Street and a gig as co-host on Good Morning Toronto, a low-rent live show on the Weather Network, Fromer was scouted to work as a reporter and anchor in Calgary for the A-Channel. She later moved to L.A. and was doing some freelance reporting for CBS when she heard that Ann Rohmer was leaving BT. “I wanted that job so bad,” she says. “It was, ‘This is it!’ ”