The critically acclaimed show returned Saturday after an almost two-decade hiatus, with Threets as its host. It is produced by Embassy Row in partnership with Buffalo Toronto Public Media, the creator of the show, and it will appear on KidZuko, a children’s YouTube channel run by Sony Pictures Television, rather than its more familiar home of PBS and PBS Kids.
In addition to Threets, the show will feature celebrity guests, including John Legend, Chrissy Teigen, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Gabrielle Union.
“I’m the biggest fan of LeVar Burton, of Mr. Rogers, of Steve Irwin, of Bob Ross — all the wholesome people in the world,” Threets said of some of the most popular PBS stars, including Burton, the former host of “Reading Rainbow.” “I think for me, just to have been considered blew my mind.”
Michael Davies, an executive producer for “Jeopardy!” who also brought “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” to the United States, began developing the “Reading Rainbow” reboot in 2020. At first, he pitched the show to all the usual suspects — the streaming platforms and the broadcast channels — and “there wasn’t really anybody out there who showed a lot of interest,” he said.
His faith in the show’s enduring appeal did not waver.
A trailer was released this week on YouTube and social media — it was viewed more than 2 million times on Instagram alone — and “everything changed,” Davies said. “Now we’re getting incoming calls.”
Unlike a reboot that Buffalo Toronto Public Media attempted in 2022, which was a one-off live event with a singing and dancing crew of five co-hosts, Threets’s version will have most of the elements of the original show, with a few modern touches. There is a rerecording of the classic theme song, and the producers have added a trivia element.
But with Threets front and center, the focus on reading won’t change.
“All I’ve ever sought to do is amplify library people and library kids,” Threets said. “And remind them that every single one of them are readers, they’re all capable, they’re all worthy.”
The reboot arrives at a charged political moment when government funding for public television has been curtailed. The show is intended to reflect public media’s “commitment to continuing to provide quality and educational content, and to ensuring that this programming is available, free of charge, to young learners,” said Nancy Hammond, an executive vice president at Buffalo Toronto Public Media and a producer of the reboot.
The original “Reading Rainbow,” funded in part by the Department of Education, ran from 1983 until 2006 with Burton at the helm. It had a specific goal of mitigating children’s learning losses over summer vacation.
The show went on to win more than 250 awards, including 26 Emmy Awards and the George Foster Peabody Award, and at times reached more than 2 million viewers a week, according to PBS, becoming the most watched program in elementary school classrooms.
Burton, an actor who is known for his roles as Kunta Kinte in “Roots” and as Geordi La Forge on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” became so inextricably linked with “Reading Rainbow” that many, including Threets, still view him as a face of children’s literacy — “If you’re upset because I’m not LeVar Burton … GET BEHIND ME!” Threets joked on Instagram.
In 2023, when President Joe Biden awarded him the National Endowment for the Humanities medal, Burton was asked to sing the opening lines of the “Reading Rainbow” theme.
Now the childhood literacy mantle will be passed to Threets, who began his journey into the world of children’s books in 2013, when he started working at a library in Northern California.
In 2020, during the pandemic, he started posting short videos on TikTok of anecdotes from the library, or of him reading books. It proved wildly popular, with his account gaining more than 847,000 followers and more than a dozen of his videos garnering more than one million views.
Last March, after facing personal mental health challenges, he left his job with the intention to take his own life the next day, he said. But it was seeing the joy of children at the library that kept him living.
A few months later, he was offered “Reading Rainbow.” There was no audition for the role, Davies said. As soon as his team suggested Threets, it immediately felt like the perfect fit for a show that was intended to be produced natively on a social media platform.
“It wasn’t what saved me, but it helped me stay another day,” Threets said.