The short answer is that, as Burns told the Huffington Post in 2016, he just felt like it was time. "I was getting older; I was losing my hair; a lot of the original gangsters on the show, like the people who created it, were all moving on to other careers," he recalled. "I just had a gut feeling like it was time to go."

The popular rumor surrounding Burns' departure said he left to make it big in music, but as he told HuffPo, that was never really true. "I certainly wasn't leaving Blue's Clues to pursue a large music career because that never even happened," he pointed out. "That was just a wonderful dream come true, [a] hobby thing that happened after Blue's Clues." His belated admission jibes with comments he made on the Blue's Clues tenth anniversary show, when he jokingly refused to lose his hair on kids' TV—and as he recalled during an interview with MTV, he wondered, "Well, is this really what I came to New York to do? Why not quit right when I'm at my peak?" Steve Burns: the Dave Chappelle of children's programming.