Fred Rogers and Daniel Tiger, the title character in PBSâs new childrenâs show.  IT’S been nearly a decade since the death of Fred Rogers in early 2003 and 11 years since the last original episode of his long-running PBS children’s show, “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” was broadcast. That’s practically an eternity in the fast-morphing world of children’s television. At least three cable networks devoted solely to the demographic have been created since then.  But on Monday the Rogers vision will come to life again, albeit in very different form.  “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood,” which most PBS stations will show twice every weekday, has no sweater-wearing father figure to shepherd young viewers gently. The show, built around the fictional young offspring of Rogers’s original puppet characters, including Daniel Striped Tiger, is aimed at a narrow demographic, 2-to-4-year-olds, while the original program was designed for a broader audience.  Most significant, the live-action neighborhood created in Rogers’s studio in the 1960s has given way to a brightly animated world. As one commenter — who appended a symbol depicting an unhappy face — noted on the PBS Facebook page, “I don’t recall the Original Neighborhood of Make-Believe requiring Flash,” referring to the computer animation software.  Those involved in creating the new program say that, stylistic changes aside, all the important elements from the original show are returning. “What you saw in Fred was that he talked about feelings, he talked about difficult things,” Kevin Morrison, chief operating officer of the Fred Rogers Company and the show’s co-executive producer, said in a telephone interview from Pittsburgh, the company’s home. “The death of a goldfish was not a discussion of the alphabet. It was a discussion of life. It was social and emotional, not cognitive based.”  Each half-hour episode of “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” contains two thematically tied stories from the life of a red-cardigan-wearing, 4-year-old Daniel Tiger, who talks directly to viewers as Rogers did and plays out fantasies, set to music, in what the series calls “imagination moments.” Life lessons revolve around disappointment (using Rogers’s song, “What Do You Do With the Mad That You Feel?”), sharing, separation anxiety, fear, waiting and empathy, the last of which will get a particular emphasis throughout the series. Original tunes drive the themes home.  The answers take a “Fred-ish approach,” like the “You can take a turn and then I’ll get it back” solution in the sharing episode, said Angela C. Santomero, a co-executive producer of the program and founding partner and chief creative officer of Out of the Blue Enterprises, which was hired to create the episodes. Some programs are more practical, dealing with toilet training (“Stop and go right away”) and getting a cold (“It’s best to rest”). In between stories live-action scenes feature real kids in related situations.  The newly invented character universe includes O the Owl, nephew of the original X the Owl, and Katerina Kittycat, daughter of Henrietta Pussycat and a father who is not often around. That dynamic is designed to depict different kinds of families and friendships, said Ms. Santomero, who was raised on the original “Neighborhood” and credits Rogers with her decision to study early childhood development.  Arriving at the current format took six years, starting with the realization by the nonprofit Family Communications (it changed its name to the Fred Rogers Company in 2010) that it would not be able to survive without developing a new television show, something it had never done.  “We started out with a clean sheet of paper,” Mr. Morrison said. “Nothing was off the table except having some guy in a sweater pretending to be Mr. Rogers. Fred was a unique character and cannot be replaced.”  Rogers himself had been quietly conducting “an underground search, so to speak, for someone who could take over the program,” Joanne Rogers, his widow, said in a telephone interview. “Fred would have liked to have had someone who could do that.” But, she said, he never found anyone, “and I figured that if he couldn’t, we couldn’t either.”
Itâs been more than a decade since the last original episode of âMister Rogersâ Neighborhood,â but Fred Rogersâs lessons will return in an animated series called âDaniel Tigerâs Neighborhood.â