Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Is Getting Bigger

PHOTO BY LILO GUEST/COURTESTY OF FRED ROGERS PRODUCTIONS

Pittsburgh’s favorite neighbor now has a YouTube channel.

Fred Rogers Productions, which owns, oversees and disseminates Mister Rogers Neighborhood content across 200 countries, started a YouTube channel earlier this month. It aims to “spark wonder and imagination through full episodes, classic Mister Rogers songs and moments, factory visits, musical performances and much more,” according to the channel bio.

Kristin DiQuollo, the creative director for the channel and an executive producer with Fred Rogers Productions, says YouTube provides the perfect avenue for making Mister Rogers Neighborhood available to an even wider audience, including a new generation of children and parents who seem to increasingly favor platforms like it instead of traditional TV.  

“We know his messages are timeless, they’re relevant,” DiQuollo says of Mister Rogers. “We want all those messages of kindness and community and curiosity and learning and wonder to be available, accessible, discoverable, shareable — more than ever before.” 

If you currently access Mister Rogers content another way, don’t worry; all episodes will continue to be broadcast on its current platforms. It will still continue to air on PBS stations across the country, and select episodes are still available to stream on PBS Kids. There’s even a 24/7 Mister Rogers Neighborhood channel on Pluto TV. 

But, DiQuollo says, the YouTube channel is the company’s chance to make the neighborhood even bigger. 

“When Fred Rogers launched Mister Rogers Neighborhood in the late ‘60s, his goal at the time was to create somethingvaluable for children … using the widest available platform at that time, which was TV,” she says. “We think that this is a nice extension in that we can use what is not a very widely available platform for lots of people around the world to bring the messages over.” 

She adds that Fred Rogers Productions will be controlling and curating the channel in thoughtful ways. Ten full episodes will be available to stream on-demand on the channel at one time, and a new episode will roll in every Saturday, replacing a previous one. Additionally, five episodes will be available at a time through the channel’s livestream. 

When Mister Rogers Neighborhood was first airing, it was designed and written as five episodes over the course of a week, with weekly themes that ranged from superheroes to grief. The relatively small number of episodes available on the channel at one time will allow the production company to curate weekly themes, while also serving as resources for parents who may be seeking specific messages for their little ones.

As for which episodes are rotated out at the end of the week, DiQuollo says the production company will be playing it by ear.

“One of the beautiful things about YouTube is that we get a lot of data, so we’ll kind of understand what the audience is looking for and make choices based on that,” she says. 

Mister Rogers Neighborhood boasts a repertoire of more than 900 episodes, but DiQuollo says only 52 are available via PBS stations. The YouTube channel will also serve as a way to present some rare content, or content that hasn’t been distributed in a long time, which even die-hard fans may not have seen.

There will eventually be original content, too, although DiQuollo adds that details on that front are still pending. 

The addition of the new channel comes at a time in which divisive rhetoric flows freely on the Internet — and in the real world, too. Mister Rogers Neighborhood has often aimed to quell society’s rage through gestures of compassion, benevolence and inclusion; folks often cite a 1969 episode in which Fred Rogers invited Officer Clemmons, a Black police officer on the show, to join him in soaking his feet in a wading pool to beat the heat. Rogers shared his own towel with Clemmons, taking a quiet yet radically kind stance against racial inequality. 

The new YouTube channel allows children to access content that helps them understand the world and the importance of kindness in it — both toward others and toward oneself.

“I think that those messages remain important. They’re very grounding. They’re simple, and they’re human,” DiQuollo says. “I think that’s a reason that Mister Rogers Neighborhood remains so timeless … that emotional authenticity, that connection, just resonates, and I think it transcends the platform that it’s on.”

You can check out the new YouTube channel here.