Janice Burgess (Bubble Guppies, Little Bill), most notably known as the creator of the hit 2000s Nickelodeon musical series The Backyardigans, passed away Saturday. According to The Hollywood Reporter, former Nickelodeon co-worker of Burgess, Brown Johnson (Sesame Street, LazyTown), alerted The New York Times that the twice-Daytime Emmy award-winner passed away under hospice care following a battle with breast cancer. Burgess was 72.
The Backyardigans aired on Nick Jr. for four seasons from 2004 until 2013 and was immensely popular among young children. The series followed five neighbors who happened to be animals: Austin, Uniqua, Pablo, Tasha, and Tyrone. The group would all gather in their shared backyard to go on imaginative and fantastical adventures, sometimes traveling overseas and even time-traveling.
While working as a production executive at Nick Jr., Burgess envisioned a live-action show called Me and My Friends featuring actors wearing full-body puppet costumes. When that didn’t land with executives, she proposed that computer animation begin on The Backyardigans.
The Hollywood Reporter notes that Burgess once said, “Making The Backyardigans has become sort of like an adventure that I go on with my friends. Of course, we get paid, but we do get to be carefree in our work, enjoy each other, hang around a lot, travel a little bit and make up stuff.”
Burgess also sat down with Investor’s Business Daily in 2009 and said that Uniqua “is me. Or at least who I was as a kid. She’s a ringleader. Out of the five, Uniqua is the main character, and we use her in every story. I think most preschoolers have a sense of their own specialness, and that’s what Uniqua is about.”
She won a Daytime Emmy in 2008 after sharing six nominations for her work on the series.
Burgess was born on March 1, 1952, and raised in Pittsburgh. In 1974, she graduated with a degree in art history from Brandeis University. She then began her television career by volunteering at WQED-TV, a Pittsburgh PBS station specializing in craft service.
“I got to know about the schedules and made sure the caterer came at the right time and the table was set up. That’s how I got started,” said Burgess via The Hollywood Reporter.
In 1992, Burgess worked at Children’s Television Workshop as a project manager for the series Ghostwriter before moving on to Nickelodeon, where she was an executive in charge of production on Blue Clues and Gullah Gullah Island. Burgess later became a vice president for Nick Jr.
She was also a producer on Little Bill, created by Bill Cosby (The Cosby Show, I Spy), where she won her first Daytime Emmy in 2004 before The Backyardigans took flight. Other work credits for Burgess include her as a creative director, writer, and story editor on Winx Club by Nickelodeon. From 2014 until 2016, she was an executive consultant for DreamWorks Animation Television.
Many took to social media to mourn Burgess’s passing and remember her legacy in children’s television. As per The Hollywood Reporter, producer Chris Nee (Doc McStuffins, We the People) made post on X (formerly Twitter) to pay tribute to Burgess, saying, “I learned how to care deeply about telling stories to kids from #JaniceBurgess. And how to make myself laugh while doing it.”
Additionally, Fracaswell Hyman (The Burial, Romeo!), Burgess’s colleague and a writer for multiple Nick Jr. shows, remembered her by posting on Instagram about the time when Burgess was brought from the C-suite to work alongside creatives on Gullah Gullah Island.
She wrote in the caption, “Janice swept in with her acid-tongued wit, flowing Hermes scarves and omnipresent cigarettes. Instead of an overseer, she became a friend. Her script/story critiques were astute, clear and constructive — and I really thank her for that… Janice, Maria Perez-Brown (Taina, Model Latina) and I developed shows together, gossiped together and oh, how we laughed!”
Burgess is survived by her brother, Jack.