Blue Clues host’s new project hopes to reconnect adults with the popular show they loved as kids

Steve Burns, the host of the popular 1990s television showBlues Clues, is trying to engage with his now-grown up audience to search for bigger clues toward a better and more understandable life. That’s the motivation behind the launch of his new podcast titled Alive. This podcast was conceived shortly after Burns’ viral check-in with his audience back in 2021, and he hopes that the kids who grew up with him will check in with him on this new platform.

“I really want to continue what we started decades ago,” Burns told Variety in a press release. “For us, it was all about curious investigation. It was about looking a little closer. About asking the right questions. About following the clues that helped lead us toward greater understanding. Alive is really just a continuation of that same conversation—only now we’re grown-ups, trying to make sense of a world that’s a whole lot more complicated.”

“Adults need to be shepherded through life just as much as kids do, and Steve is the perfect person to do it,” said Jessica Cordova Kramer, CEO of Lemonada, the media company behind Alive. “He taps right into your inner child, helping listeners feel delight, comfort and curiosity. From the moment we saw Steve’s videos on TikTok during the pandemic, we knew we had to work with him.”

Burns had been host and human face of Blues Clues for 98 episodes and other specials before he stepped away from his role in 2003. Until recently, his primary focus had been on his indie music career, touring with The Flaming Lips and penning the theme song to the CBS show Young Sheldon. After tens of millions of people who watched him as children reacted so strongly to his viral check-in, he wanted to bring them a podcast with guests that can help them navigate through loneliness, masculinity, success, failure, and other aspects of life. Essentially, an adult version of the Blues Clues that this audience knows but with “less talking furniture.”

Burns’ podcast venture is another revival of a children’s program that has been altered to not just be pure childhood nostalgia, but offer something familiar-yet-grown-up to the original audience that have aged 20+ years since the original show’s peak. Another example includes when Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens) did a 2009 Broadway stage revival of his children’s television show Pee-wee’s Playhouse that 80s kids enjoyed. Kevin Smith’s Masters of the Universe revival on Netflix took the popular syndicated 80s cartoon and continued its original continuity with more mature themes, action, and writing to appease now-adult Millennials while shining a more modern lens on some characters. While there is obviously a nostalgia button being pushed, the choice to explore different mediums, different story paths, and offer more grown-up perspectives brings freshness along with the familiarity.

It will be interesting to see who decides to come along with Steve and his podcast. While it promises to involve Steve searching for the ultimate clues to life, it will likely ask audiences to search more actively along with him now that they’re adults.