Steve from BLUE’S CLUES Shows Up for His Fans in a New Way

Published: September 24, 2024

Steve from BLUE’S CLUES Shows Up for His Fans in a New Way

By Movieguide® Contributor

After leaving BLUE’S CLUES in 2001 to deal with his severe depression, Steve Burns has returned through social media to provide the generation that grew up with him a place to process their struggles.

After leaving his hosting gig to tackle his depression and attend college, Burns returned to the scene in 2021 to say hi to his fans and even reprise his role on the show for a few episodes. Since then he has been an advocate for mental health and has created a social media presence where he provides his followers with a place to freely share their feelings.

“I didn’t know it yet, but I was the happiest depressed person in North America,” Burns told Variety in 2022 when explaining why he left the show. “I was struggling with severe clinical depression the whole time I was on that show. It was my job to be utterly and completely full of joy and wonder at all times, and that became impossible. I was always able to dig and find something that felt authentic to me that was good enough to be on the show, but after years and years of going to the well without replenishing it, there was a cost.”

“My strategy had been: ‘Hey, you got a great thing going, so just fight it!’ Turns out, you don’t fight depression; you collect it. After I left BLUE’S CLUES, there was a long period of healing. It wasn’t until the death of my father that I really started to take things seriously, and my life became so much more manageable,” Burns continued.

Having learned how to manage his own mental health struggles, and finding value in therapy, Burns now runs pseudo-therapy sessions through his social media. Many of his posts on TikTok are comprised of him looking at the camera and asking, ‘How are you?’ and that is the entire video.

While this is an extremely simple format, Burns’ nostalgic presence along with his soothing voice causes many who grew up with BLUE’S CLUES to freely share how they are doing in the comments section, both the good and the bad.

After helping millions of people learn how to tackle problems when they were kids, 20 years later, Burns is now helping millions of adults face the real world.

Movieguide® previously reported on Burns:

Steve Burns, the iconic host of 90s children’s show BLUE’S CLUES recently opened up about his battle with depression, which he discovered after he left the show to go to college.

Currently, Steve lives in a cabin in the Catskill Mountains, but said that he has never felt more connected.

“I’m most often alone up here, but I’m very rarely lonely,” Steve, 49, told Variety. “There’s much more of me to share here than there was in New York City. I was deflecting all of the stimulus at all times.”

“I grew up in the Pennsylvania version of this,” he added of his childhood. “My mother always said that as soon as she turned on a vacuum cleaner, I would be like, ‘Nope, I’m out,’ and go into the woods and build a fort.”

Steve, who drew inspiration from Fred Rogers, provided entertainment for children across the U.S. from 1996 to 2006 and taught them simple lessons about life and education.