Sweet and savvy Blue's Clues has become a preschool sensation

Steve Burns looks into the camera and asks, "Will you help me?" Then he pauses. It's like the TV hesitation that occurs on sitcoms right after a punch line, waiting for the laugh track to swell and subside. But the host of Nickelodeon's Blue's Clues is waiting for something else: viewer participation. After a moment, he smiles broadly. "You will? That's great!"

Burns's pleas for help are at the heart of Blue's Clues, the wildly successful preschooler's show now in its third season (weekdays, 9:30 A.M. and 12:30 P.M./ET). Wearing a green rugby shirt and khakis, Burns--the show's only human--traipses through a computer-generated world that resembles an animated felt board in fruit-stripe colors, singing catchy ditties while encouraging his young audience to solve cognitive problems by following paw-print "clues" left by his animated dog, Blue.

And kids are responding. Since Blue's Clues premiered in September 1996, it has snowballed into the most watched show on television among preschoolers, bigger than Sesame Street, Barney or Arthur. IT has spawned a U.K. version with a British host; German, Italian and Latin American editions are in the works. It has even become a campy hit in some college dorms.

This year, Blue's graduated to true cultural phenomenon.  Celebrity fans Rosie O'Donnell and Gloria Estefan made cameos on the "Blue's Birthday" episode, which got a special prime-time airing last June. And there's the inevitable deluge of tie-in merchandise: plush toys, coloring books, a CD-ROM and home videos, even a play-along kit with a "handy-dandy notebook" like the spiral one Steve uses to write down each episode's clues.

Unfortunately, this blitz may obscure the fact that Blue's Clues is one of those rare instances when commercial television is both creative and educational without sacrificing entertainment value. It savvily combines high-tech and low-tech, intensive research and gut instinct, fun and challenge.

Experts in the field adore it. "Blue's Clues is delicious," says Peggy Charren, the legendary founder of Action for Children's Television, "partly because it's unlike anything else on TV. And it's easy to find the educational significance, whereas the networks that call their Saturday morning shows educational should have their mouths washed out with soap!"

That Blue's Clues is outdrawing Sesame Street is "great," adds Dorothy Singer, the codirector of Yale University's Family Television Research and Consultation Center. "Sesame Street is too fast-paced and jumps all over the place. It started a model that a lot of [children's TV] producers follow. But kids need scenes to last longer and be explained to them. Blue's Clues has one scene and stays with it." In fact, the show is more patient than that: The same episode airs all week long, enabling children to thoroughly master all the clues by Friday.

In New York City offices where the series is produced, a sense of fun prevails. The entry hall is plastered with photos of the staff members from their preschool years, "to inspire us about who we're making the show for," says cocreator and head writer Angela C. Santomero. The original concept came from Nick Jr. senior vice president Brown Johnson, who envisioned a sort of game show for kids. "We believe that kids come to TV with an active mind," Johnson says. "It's there to stimulate them to think." Santomero was teamed with in-house producer Todd Kessler, who had written and directed other Nick Jr. shows such as Maurice Sendak's Little Bear. Kessler admits he hadn't let his own kids watch much TV because he felt it was unsuitable. "TV isn't usually at their level, doesn't speak their language," says Kessler, now Blue's Clues' executive producer. "There's this myth that kids have a short attention span. But if you tell a good story, they'll sit." He wanted to make a show visual enough to be comprehensible with the sound turned off.

To design this brave new world, Traci Paige Johnson, a cutout animator who had never worked with computers, was hired. Johnson came up with the radical idea of making all the characters and objects by hand out of preschool materials before they're scanned into desktop computers to be animated, giving a quirky homespun air to the high-tech environment. A baby's cradle is actually a hollowed-out peanut shell. "We want everything to be 'yummy,'" says Johnson, "so you want to reach out and grab it."

Steve's segments are shot first; like an actor in a special-effects movie, he stands in front of a blue screen and has to imagine all the action that will be added around him. Often his includes instructions like, "Characters will be very close--try no to flail arms." Burns showed up for his audition with long hair, an earring and combat fatigues; he couldn't sing and didn't know any children. But the creators immediately loved him; Johnson said Burns's appeal is "like a cool babysitter that parents feel comfortable with."

Burns says the show works best "when my character is a step behind the audience, and I really need their help," and reveals that his style is based on another blue legend. "It's all about [Sesame Street's] Grover. He's my biggest influence--his early work."

Before each episode is aired, a team of writers and staff researchers road test the script and rough cut with preschoolers in the New York metropolitan area to make sure it's age appropriate but still challenging. That's all part of the show's essential aim: keeping its young viewers actively engaged. "The best teachers do this kind of educating, like putting on plays to get kids involved," says Santomero, who is delighted that her program is making a real impact on its audience. "When Fonzie got a library card on Happy Days, [people getting] library cards went up something like 500 percent. Now kids watch Blue's Clues, and they're walking around with notebooks, thinking."