Why Is Everyone Freaking Out About ‘Blue’s Clues?’

Everything we can’t stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture. [Manage newsletters]( [View in browser]( [Image] with Kevin Fallon Everything we can’t stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture. This Week: - Everyone’s Blue’s Clues hysteria is wrong. - The only 9/11 content I can bear this week. - I saw Sonja Morgan’s “caburlesque” show. - I’m offended by Jennifer Lawrence’s bangs. - The worst reality show I’ve ever heard of. I’m a Grown Man Who Can’t Stop Thinking About Blue’s Clues Here’s the thing we don’t talk about when we talk about turn of the millennium music. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, yes we had [Spice Girls]( and [Hanson](. It was the golden age of boy bands—ask me if I prefer NSYNC or Backstreet Boys and get ready to see a flawless recreation of [Meryl Streep](’s performance in Sophie’s Choice. Britney and Christina were about to come out, and so, eventually, would I. It was the age of TRL, and you could like Destiny’s Child, Kid Rock, Korn, Mandy Moore, DMX, and Faith Hill all at the same time. But the bops that really stuck with us? Those were from [Blue’s Clues](. In our [redacted] years on this earth, we have been on many dance floors at various stages of inebriation, having out-of-body experiences as, most likely, a Robyn or ABBA song plays. But try to tell me there has ever been a more euphoric music event than being in your living room while your TV was programmed to Nickelodeon and you’ve just “[figured out Blue’s clues](.” Steve is singing. That animated cartoon dog is scampering around the screen. You’ve entered a new state of consciousness as you dance along. Life was good. And can we talk about [the mail song](? Try and tell me that you’ve gone to your mailbox once in the last 20 years without singing in your head, “Here’s the mail / it never fails / it makes you want to wag your tail…” (Don’t even get me started on the Thinking Chair.) Kids’ shows have a way of permeating mainstream culture. Mention Teletubbies, Arthur, Wishbone, The Big Comfy Couch, or Zoboomafoo, and brace for a millennial’s monologue of nostalgia. Over the years, phenomena like SpongeBob Squarepants, Franklin, Bob the Builder, and, lately, Paw Patrol or Bluey puncture the zeitgeist outside of their intended pre-school audience. The funny thing about shows like these is that people don’t just have recognition or memories associated with them, but a fierce sense of ownership. They are unbreakably tethered to formative experiences either they had or watched someone close to them—a child, a sibling, a niece or nephew—have. In that way, they almost transform into religious text. That is why everyone absolutely lost their damn minds over Blue’s Clues this week… and why it kind of irritated me. Here’s the CliffsNotes for the uninitiated. Blue’s Clues is a children’s show that launched on Nickelodeon in 1996 and became one of those insane hits where buying toys themed to it sparked fistfights at Wal-Mart over the holidays. The only human character was a man named Steve, played by Steve Burns, who was boyishly handsome and wore a green-striped long-sleeved polo (the kind it would take more than a decade for me to realize I could not pull off). His animated dog, Blue, would leave clues throughout his house about what adventures she (Blue is a girl, and the controversy over that may be the best argument against gendering colors) was getting into that day. Steve would lead the audience through his discovery of the clues, typically involving educational puzzles, and then sing a little bit and wave goodbye. By 2002, Blue’s Clues was attracting about 13.7 million viewers a week, which, for context, is about what The Big Bang Theory was getting in its final season. Amidst all that success, Burns abruptly left the show, setting off, in addition to a global audience of abandonment issues, a vicious rumor mill about his eventual doom and demise that metastasized in the age of the internet and online gossip. There was talk that Steve embodied the White Guy cliché: that he left to pursue a career in music. Darker whispers followed that he was addicted to heroin and had actually died of an overdose. When he was spotted in public again, people thought he was still dead but then replaced by a lookalike to cover it up. It’s crazy shit. He eventually appeared on The Rosie O’Donnell Show to dispel the rumors. Blue’s Clues continued on, with the character of Steve’s younger brother Joe, played by Donovan Patton, taking over. A 2019 revival, called Blue’s Clues & You! stars Filipino-American entertainer and model Joshua Dela Cruz, who is extremely charming and an absolute snack. ([You’re welcome](.) All of this backstory matters because the original Steve himself returned this week. In a [video posted to Nick Jr.’s Twitter]( account for the show’s 25th anniversary, Burns returned as Steve to address the audience. Not the current audience, but the audience of all those years ago, the people who are now all grown up and wondered—even if maliciously—what had happened to him. As it is when something detonates a grenade in the sweet spot of millennial nostalgia, the internet lost its damn mind. ”You remember how when we were younger, we used to run around and hang out with Blue and find clues and talk to Mr. Salt and freak out about the mail and do all the fun stuff?” he said. “And then one day, I was like, 'Oh hey, guess what? Big news, I’m leaving. Here’s my brother Joe, he’s your new best friend,' and then I got on a bus and I left and we didn’t see each other for like a really long time? Can we just talk about that? Great. Because I realize that was kind of abrupt." It was like an absentee father apologizing after decades of neglect. Burns was dressed as Steve, and explained in character that he had gone off to college, commiserating with the viewers over what grown-up life was like. “I mean, we started out with clues and now, it’s what? Student loans and jobs and families? And some of it has been kind of hard, you know? I know you know.” The whole thing was so sweet, and of course people felt emotional and validated by it. But the strange part was how quickly it escalated from “this very nice internet thing” to a hysterical news story. Major publications started to report the video as fact, that Burns had returned from decades of silence to clear up the mystery of what happened by explaining that he went to college. But the thing is: Burns was never silent, and he didn’t leave to go to college. This video was him in character as Steve, explaining Steve’s story. It isn’t—and was never—his own. Burns gave many interviews over the years explaining why he left Blue’s Clues. Simply put, he was over it. He never intended to be a career children’s entertainer. He was getting older. It felt like the right time to go. “I knew I wasn’t going to be doing children’s television all my life, mostly because I refused to lose my hair on a kid’s TV show, and it was happening, fast,” he said at the time. (He shaved his head the day after his final show. Asked if it was a rebellious statement, he replied, “Yes, the statement is, ‘We have male pattern baldness.’”) In [a 2016 interview](, he reiterated, “I left the show because it was just simply time to go. I was pretty much playing a boyish, older-brotherish kind of character on the show. I was getting older; I was losing my hair; a lot of the original people on the show, like the people who created it, were all moving on to other careers. It just felt like time. I just had a gut feeling like it was time to go.” I guess I’m just marveling at how quickly we all took a sweet and sentimental—and scripted—segment and took it at face value as real-life fact. It would be like, I don’t know, assuming whatever plotline Grace Adler had on the Will & Grace revival was Debra Messing’s actual life. Left unaddressed, I guess, was that in the years since Steve went to college we became knee-jerk online reactionists who forgot about the necessity of following all the clues and engaging in critical thinking (maybe even in a Thinking Chair) before jumping to conclusions. The truth is that I was slightly too old for Blue’s Clues in its heyday, but my little brother is nearly a decade younger than me. It’s an underreported blast to have a sibling that young. While all your friends and classmates are obsessed with being older and performing maturity, you get to unabashedly tap into kid things again, under the guise of entertaining your sibling. You’re also at an age where you can witness and appreciate how good your parents are at being parents. Plus, you get to watch Blue’s Clues. This is to say that I’ve loved having the show and Steve back in the zeitgeist this week. But as a purist, I couldn’t let the misinformation slide! Maybe we’re all in a state where we’re desperate for the comfort of fictionalized nostalgia, to the extent that we manifest it as real life. I get that. Especially now when things are so confusing, we gather the facts and put them in our notebooks. But now what do we do? The 9/11 Programming I Can Stomach Watching There are a number of excellent documentaries and docuseries timed to the [20th anniversary of 9/11]( that have [come out this week]( and in recent weeks. I don’t have it in me to watch any of them. That’s not a particularly noble or educated stance to take, but it’s a product of exhaustion. This was a tragedy that occurred at the crux of a television, film, and internet explosion. For two decades, we never stopped parsing it, telling the stories, and grieving. Especially at a breaking point when it comes to horrific news and, it turns out, their direct connection to those events, I’m too emotionally expired. [Alternate text] With all that said, it is curious which pieces of 9/11-adjacent entertainment I have been drawn to these last few weeks. For example, there’s the filmed version of the [Broadway musical Come From Away]( that premieres on Apple TV+ this weekend. “[Musical about 9/11](” sounds like nothing any human would want to see, which makes it all the more remarkable how healing and pleasing this show actually is—and what a gift it is that people outside of New York can see it on screen. It takes place in the small Canadian town of Gander, where dozens of planes were forced to land when flights were grounded and their passengers made to live in a state of emotional chaos amid the citizens of the town. This really happened, and it’s rather shocking to me that more hasn’t been made of the unusual circumstances, especially since it is such a feel-good story about humanity and kindness. In Come From Away, the songs are fine enough and the performances are solid. But it’s hard to remember a more cathartically emotional theatrical experience. By virtue of the subject matter and, all these years later, the rawness of what happened, you basically just cry the entire show. It feels good. I know that’s not always an attractive sell, but I encourage you to watch. There’s also the Netflix film Worth, about the lawyer who was tasked with determining what dollar amount would be the proper compensation for the families of 9/11 victims. Again, because of those three numbers in the plot description, it’s an agonizing watch. But it’s paced like a legal drama, which allows you to dissociate a bit and get lost in the peculiar task at hand—until the weight of what the legal maneuvering is in pursuit of crashes back down. There’s acting from Stanley Tucci and Michael Keaton that rank among their respective career best, and a breathtaking supporting turn from [Tony-winner Laura Benanti]( as a widow. It’s just a really good film. Most surprising, and probably very weird, is the way that I’ve gravitated to the bizarre TV commercials that I have clear memories of that aired in the wake of the tragedy and have gone viral again this week. The New York Times [published an oral history]( of [Broadway’s ad campaign]( to bring people back to the theater, which adds a lot of color to the Where’s Waldo game of spot the random celebrity in the crowd of singers. Then there’s [NBC’s commercial promoting it’s fall lineup](, featuring somber behind-the-scenes footage of stars from Friends, The West Wing, ER, Frasier, and more and an indescribably morbid piano score. I need an analysis of just what the American psyche was in that week that produced a tone that was… that. I Saw Sonja Morgan’s Cabaret Show In these “the world is sort of reopen but there’s still a raging pandemic” times, every social outing brings with it the calculus of, “What if this is the event where I got COVID?” And with that in mind, I found myself in a basement theater watching Sonja Morgan’s cabaret premiere. Sonja In Your City, a hybrid stand-up comedy, improv, and cabaret show (“caburlesque” is her description) launched this week at Improv Asylum in New York City. That makes Morgan, who [stars on The Real Housewives of New York City](, the second cast member of the series to mount such a show. It would be tempting to wonder if Morgan was stepping on the Jovani train of [Luann de Lesseps](, whose enthusiasm over her own cabaret tour has become her defining personality trait, were it not for the fact that Sonja In Your City is such absolute chaos. Beautiful, fitting, undeniably entertaining chaos. Here are things that happened during the debut performance of Sonja In Your City: Two men performed a rap about her being “the baddest fucking bitch on the Upper East Side” as she twerked. She interviewed audience members to become her new “interns,” performing a lap dance on one. She took control of another audience member’s Grindr account. She instructed, using a dildo, how to give a perfect hand job. She went live on OnlyFans. She kept thinking she was in different sketches, or forgot which sketch she was in, presumably because of the nature of improv and things not being the same as in rehearsal. She revealed that Tom D’Agostino, the ex-husband of de Lesseps, was not good in bed. There are people who paid good money to be in the audience of the Sonja In Your City premiere, and I can say with authority that they got their money’s worth. In between tossing off legitimately hilarious dick jokes—practically one a minute—and rambling until she occasionally lost the point herself, never has it been more clear that the Sonja Morgan you see on Bravo is the genuine Sonja Morgan. You leave feeling like you have hung out with her and that such company is a legitimately great time. The Worst Bangs I Have Ever Seen [Alternate text] First-look images were released this week of the new film Don’t Look Up starring Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Meryl Streep. Presumably these bangs are a character choice. But is it worth it? What the Hell Is This Show? Every word [in this tweet]( is more cursed than the one that precedes it. [Alternate text] [Alternate text] - Real Housewives of Salt Lake City: The first two minutes already leaked and they’re the greatest two minutes of television we’ve ever seen. (Sun. on Bravo) - Come From Away: It’s a great, cathartic show. (Fri. on Apple TV+) - LuLaRich: A documentary on the rise and fall of the leggings that one girl from high school kept trying to sell on Facebook. (Fri. on Amazon) [Alternate text] - Cinderella: No amount of horse pills will save you from this movie. (Fri. on Amazon) - Frogger: In New York, we call this “crossing the street,” and no one gives me money when I succeed. (Thu. on Peacock) Advertisement [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( © Copyright 2021 The Daily Beast Company LLC 555 W. 18th Street, New York NY 10011 [Privacy Policy]( If you are on a mobile device or cannot view the images in this message, [click here]( to view this email in your browser. To ensure delivery of these emails, please add emails@thedailybeast.com to your address book. 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