Key Takeaways
- Mychal Threets will bring Reading Rainbow back for a new season on its official YouTube channel on Oct. 16, promising “learning, stories, and fun.”
- Threets began hosting the reboot in October 2025, carrying forward the book-loving spirit of LeVar Burton’s original PBS series, which ran for 23 seasons and won a Peabody and 26 Emmys.
- The announcement follows Threets’ candid mental-health updates, including his recent message that he was “not OK” but remained hopeful and was trying his best.
Mychal Threets is bringing Reading Rainbow back on Oct. 16—a return that puts the librarian and online book advocate at the center of one of children’s television’s most enduring cultural institutions. The new season will premiere on the show’s official YouTube channel.
“Reading Rainbow is back!” he wrote on Bluesky on Tuesday, October 13, alongside a video of himself reading in a brightly colored book nook. “Get ready for a new season of learning, stories, and fun!”
Long before it became a shorthand for childhood nostalgia, Reading Rainbow was a PBS fixture hosted and produced by LeVar Burton. The original series debuted in 1983 and ran for 23 seasons, using children’s books, field trips, and young readers’ recommendations to turn reading into an adventure.
The show produced 155 episodes, won a Peabody and 26 Emmys, and became the network’s most-watched classroom program.
For a generation of viewers, Burton’s Reading Rainbow was an after-school show that made books feel like a passport—to a different place, a new hobby, or a bigger idea. The series encouraged children to choose stories for themselves, a mission that has helped it stay in pop culture long after its original run ended.
Threets entered that lineage when he began hosting the reboot in October 2025. Already known for his joyful library videos and reading recommendations on social media, he brought that same book-loving energy to the franchise in a social-media-era format.
The announcement of the new season of Reading Rainbow also arrives after Threets has shared candid updates about his mental health. According to The Huffington Post, on World Mental Health Day, Oct. 10, he told followers, “I’m not doing well. I’m not OK. But I believe that’s OK, because I’m trying my best.”
The message came weeks after he sought psychiatric treatment, later telling supporters that he had hope he would get “to OK.”
