Fans of the former Blue's Clues host openly shared their feelings in the comments.
@hioutthereitsmestevess |
Steve Burns, known as Steve from Nickelodeon's beloved preschool series Blue's Clues, has left his followers emotional after posting a couple of poignant videos to his TikTok page amid the news that Donald Trump had won the 2024 presidential election, offering a comforting presence to fans.
In a short clip shared to TikTok on Tuesday, Nov. 5, the actor looked into the camera with a concerned, compassionate look on his face, wearing a blue jacket and glasses.
"Hello," he said in a gentle voice. "What's going on out there? How are you?"
For the remainder of the video, Burns appeared to listen to the answers of his followers—who had plenty to say in response.
"Steve I'm sitting in bed sobbing," wrote one person.
"We aren't ok Steve.. it's a sad day," admitted someone else.
"Steve, I'm just EXHAUSTED," a third fan commented.
"Steve I'm really scared and I don't know what to do with what's going on," yet another follower wrote.
"as soon as I saw it was you Steve I started sobbing. I'm so scared. I can't," an additional TikToker agreed.
In a similar video posted to TikTok on the day after the election, Burns didn't say a word. Instead, he spent a quiet moment outdoors, bringing out a pair of mugs, placing one down in front of the camera offering viewers a hot drink, and sipping from the other mug with his arms resting on a fence. In the background, birds chirped and the wind blew. At the end of the video, the beloved star gave a nod to his viewers and took a deep breath.
Interestingly, Steve doesn’t even speak in the 59-second video, but appears to give viewers a comforting presence as he enters the outdoors shot
The newer video drew a similar response, also going viral as fans looked to the star for reassurance and even offered their own with several comments reading "Thank you for sitting with us" and "the question is Are you ok Steve?"
"Didn’t even say anything," another top-liked response read. "Just cried."
"The little nod made me burst into [tears]," someone else admitted. "Steve, thanks for showing up for us today 🫶🏻."
"He didn’t say A WORD and said everything at the same time. This man should be guarded at all costs," one more declared.
One woman wrote, “Steve I’m trying real hard not to cry at my big girl job today but it’s not easy,” while another said, “Everything feels so heavy today.”
“You are exactly what we need right now, ” another person commented.
"I bet you didn’t think you’d still be raising us all these years later, Steve, but thank you for still being here," gushed one fan.
"Please open the handy dandy notebook and draw us a clue because I don't know what we are going to do," added another concerned user.
The videos marks Steve’s first TikTok post since August, and the timing was not lost on his 3.3 million followers. Since it was uploaded 21 hours ago, it has been viewed more than 5 and a half million times, racking up 1 million likes and 30,000 comments in the process.
Steve has become renowned for the way that he still looks out for “the kids he raised” and consistently shows up for them when they need him most.
Earlier this year, the star brought his followers to tears following the release of the Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV docuseries.
In the series, former child actors spoke out about their alleged experiences behind the scenes of several popular Nickelodeon shows throughout the late ‘90s and early ‘00s.
Soon after the show premiered, Steve posted to his TikTok account to gently ask: “Hey, I’m checking in. Tell me, what’s going on?”
He then sat in silence for almost a minute, again, seemingly giving his followers somewhere to offload their feelings while he “listened” attentively, seemingly nodded to what was being said.
He spoke to Today in April about his decision to post that video, noting that it was his way of carrying on the “philosophy” of the beloved children's series Blue's Clues, which was “always about respect, and always about communicating with the home viewer from a place of understanding and without condescension," he shared.
“Back in the day, that meant talking about shapes and colors and graham crackers, but if you simply scale that up, now we're talking about the pandemic and student loans and adulting,” he explained. “We're talking about how difficult it is to move through this life as an adult person, but also how wonderful it is.”
“Blue’s Clues had so much silence in it. I simply wanted to do that,” he continued. “I want to see if that was possible. None of us thought that it would have the impact that it did, and we were so surprised.”
He went on to say that he was inspired by the “listening philosophy” of Fred Rogers, who noted that listening is “giving the gift” of “attention.”
“When we pay attention, we’re making an investment in someone else. And that’s the basis of compassion, in a lot of ways,” he said.
“I worry that these TikToks are making me seem like a therapist or someone who has some kind of greater understanding," he added. "My hope is that I just come off as a fellow passenger on the struggle bus, an ally."
Meanwhile, Steve opened up about his decision to step away from Blue’s Clues in a 2022 interview with Variety, where he revealed that he was “struggling with severe clinical depression the whole time” he was on the show.
Steve Burns on a 1996 episode of 'Blue's Clues'. Nickelodeon/Everett |
“It was my job to be utterly and completely full of joy and wonder at all times, and that became impossible,” he said at the time. "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."
Steve added that his life has since become “more manageable” following a “long period of healing.”
Blue's Clues first premiered on Nickelodeon in 1996, starring Burns as leading man Steve. He remained on the series until 2002, when he was then replaced by Donovan Patton. Patton played Steve's brother Joe until the show ended in 2006.
In 2019, Josh Dela Cruz nabbed the leading role for the revival Blue's Clues & You! and remains a part of the franchise, including starring in the Paramount+ feature film released in 2022.
In recent years, both Steve and Donovan star returned to the Blue’s Clues universe in a few ways, including appearing in a special Nick Jr. video for the show’s 25th anniversary in 2021, and in Nickelodeon's revival series, Blue’s Clues & You.
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