"Mr. Rogers & Me" Recalls "Mr. Rogers" Neighborhood" on PBS FOR decades he showed up in his trademark cardigan and sneakers. He sang to us and smiled. And in the measured cadence of his familiar voice he spread the unconditional love: "You've made this day a special day, by just your being you. There's no person in the whole world like you, and I like you, just the way you are. A virtual friend next door, Fred Rogers started his PBS children's show, "Mr. Rogers" Neighborhood," in 1968 and retired in 2001, a few weeks before Benjamin Wagner went to celebrate his 30th birthday at his mother's rented cottage next door to the Rogers family home in Nantucket. For one serendipitous weekend he was Mr. Rogers's actual neighbor. And neighborly Mr. Rogers was, serenading him with his signature song "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" and playing "Happy Birthday to You" on the piano in his study. He asked about the young man's job at MTV and got him talking about his parents" divorce two decades earlier. "I felt vulnerable and safe at the same time," said Mr. Wagner, 40, on a recent morning at his Times Square office, where he is now an MTV senior vice president with a shrine of Mr. Rogers mementos above his desk. But at the time he confessed to feeling out of sync, a self-described "PBS mind in a jump-cut, sound-bit MTV world." Mr. Rogers listened, then offered, "I feel so strongly that deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex," Mr. Wagner recalled, encouraging him to "spread the message." He took that suggestion to heart after Mr. Rogers's death in 2003, teaming up with his brother, Christofer, 43, a television editor, to make "Mr. Rogers & Me." The documentary has its premiere on selected PBS stations this month (check local listings) as well as iTunes and DVD on March 20, Mr. Rogers's birthday. "The me in the title is you, it's all of us," he said. Helping shepherd viewers through the ups and downs of childhood, Mr. Rogers shuttled them to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe with the aid of a toy trolley, or used the demise of a pet fish to talk about the reality of death. Always he was reassuring. "There is no person in this whole world who is a mistake," he said. No matter how different that person may seem, each person is fine. The film explores his privileged relationship with children while portraying his often transformative impact on people of all ages, through old footage and interviews with former colleagues, acquaintances, neighbors and friends. Davy Rothbart, the creator of Found magazine and a contributor to "This American Life," who met Mr. Rogers as a child and again as a reporter in 2001, described him as a lifelong role model who informed his own work. After interviewing him for a newspaper profile, Tim Madigan forged an intimate friendship with Mr. Rogers and wrote a memoir about it, "I'm Proud of You: My Friendship With Fred Rogers" (2006). That same year the author Amy Hollingsworth, who had interviewed Mr. Rogers on television in 1994, in the first interview where he spoke publicly about his faith, developed a friendship and years-long correspondence that led her to write "The Simple Faith of Fred Rogers" in 2006. The veteran National Public Radio correspondent Susan Stamberg produced a handful of live television specials with Mr. Rogers in the 1980s, including a program on how to talk to children about divorce. By phone from Washington Ms. Stamberg said her last-minute jitters about doing live television were vanquished by a call from Daniel Striped Tiger, one of Mr. Rogers's puppet characters. "I know you're frightened, Susan," Mr. Rogers said in Daniel's gentle voice. Disarmed, Ms. Stamberg admitted: "I really am! I don't want to let Mr. Rogers down! Still in character, he promised that she would have the help she needed, that everything would turn out all right. "He tapped into the frightened child in me," Ms. Stamberg recalled. By the end of our conversation I was practically sucking my thumb. He had the most extraordinary sense of loyalty to the feelings of childhood. While the documentary focuses mostly on Mr. Rogers's effect on others, we do learn, among other things, that the man who cared so much about the well-being of children was bullied as a shy, overweight boy, and that although he was an ordained minister, he did not have a congregation and never spoke on his show about God. "He embraced television, the cutting-edge technology of his day, but he always used it and wanted to see it used in the most thoughtful and measured way to be helpful to children and families, never to exploit them," said Maxwell King, a senior fellow at the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children's Media in Latrobe, Pa., Mr. Rogers's hometown. The center was established with his blessing to continue his work. "Fred Rogers never liked to refer to himself as a performer or an entertainer; he thought of himself as an educator," Mr. King said by phone. He was adamant he didn't want a Fred Rogers museum just to honor him, but a working center that would help parents and children. Mr. Wagner, for one, seems happy to cast himself as lifelong student and willing disciple. "It's not like I was shallow and complex when I met Mr. Rogers," he said. I was a young man trying to figure out who he was supposed to be when he grew up. Over the years, through a lot of personal growth and the process of making the movie, I learned that PBS and MTV were not mutually exclusive. As far as I'm concerned, we're spreading the message.