Steve Burns, the former star of the beloved children’s show “Blue’s Clues,” is inviting you back into his cozy home: Come in and take a seat. There isn’t a blue dog this time around, but Mr. Burns will make you a cup of tea.
And then, he’ll listen to you listening to him.
On Wednesday, Mr. Burns, 51, announced in a YouTube video — featuring the original thinking chair from the children’s show and some of his signature expressive hand gestures — that he was launching a podcast called “Alive,” which will be available in the fall.
“You and I have always been about this deep and curious investigation of our world,” he said in the video, addressing the audience. “It used to be about shapes and colors and letters and numbers and vegetables and stuff. But now it could really be about death and sex and taxes.”
The name, Mr. Burns said in an interview, refers to the “weird and wonderful things that go into being a human being on planet Earth” and also is a tacit nod to the fact that, for years after he left his role on the Nickelodeon show in 2002, he was presumed to be, well, not alive. This podcast was a reclamation, of sorts.
Pernicious rumors of Mr. Burns’ being dead swirled while he was dealing with clinical depression, and were exacerbated by the internet — a combination so corrosive that “I started to wonder if it was true,” he said, “if everyone else was onto something.” It led him on a yearslong “sloppy mess” of a journey dealing with his mental health concerns.
Then, in 2021, Mr. Burns re-emerged in a Twitter video posted by Nick Jr., a Nickelodeon channel for children, addressing his now-adult audience with empathy and wonderment. And last year, he started posting videos on TikTok asking his over three million followers how they’re doing while talking very little himself. He just listens.
The reactions to those interactions were so positive that “it was very healing for me,” he said. “I feel in meaningful ways that I’ve come back to life.” He also sensed a need for bigger, more thoughtful conversations with his followers. Something like a podcast, perhaps?
He pitched the show to Lemonada Media in December and the show received an almost immediate green light, said Stephanie Wittels Wachs, the podcast production company’s co-founder and chief creative officer.
“We are inundated with pitches — there’s no shortage of them, everyone wants a podcast,” she said, “but then suddenly here’s your friend from childhood, who is a familiar face, a voice that you know. He’s got this Mr. Rogers quality to him, saying, ‘Hey, you OK?’”
“We were just, like, This is going to be the antidote for — waves hands everywhere,” she added, waving her hands everywhere. Production began in March, just three months later.
In each episode, Mr. Burns invites a guest, like a hospice nurse, to discuss grown-up topics. “And then I typically will end each episode with an open-ended reflection,” he said. “It’s almost a meditation.”
Acutely aware of a certain stereotype associated with men who have podcasts — one that presents a narrow vision of masculinity and strength, with little space for vulnerability and warmth — Mr. Burns’s intention is to bring some nuance and softness to life’s complexities.
“I am very happy to be a counterpoint to the current manosphere,” he said. “We’ve forgotten about philosophical and spiritual wisdom. Go back and check it out — Yoda is the strongest person in ‘Star Wars.’ Have we forgotten the lessons of Mr. Miyagi?”
The first cut of an episode about death with the hospice nurse was filmed and recorded in late March, just a few weeks after Ms. Wittels Wachs’s father went into hospice care. Suddenly, the show felt personal to her. “It prepared me for this thing that I was about to experience more than anything could,” she said.
“I felt like this sense of empowerment through this really terrible, hard process,” she said. “That is the promise of the show, that is what Steve is doing for us as adults.”
Mr. Burns’s YouTube video announcing his podcast has already been viewed more than 58,000 times, and the comments section is awash with excitement, proclaiming that when millennials and Gen Z need him the most, he returns.
Alisha Haridasani Gupta is a Times reporter covering women’s health and health inequities.
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